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Living with Danny
motivated me to think a lot about a man
I never met; his father Lou, who died over thirty years ago. Lou has
always been a strong presence, kept alive by the stories that came from
Danny and his family - his mother Elsa, his uncles,
aunts and old friends. Over twenty four years I
gradually
pieced together a picture of the man, and it became clear to me that he
had the same qualities I loved in Danny; in loving the son, I grew to
love the father. Our children always had a special feeling about their
grandfather and thought of him as a kind
of guardian angel who protected them, such was the power of the man
long after his death. All the stories about him were part of our family
folklore. We each experienced at different times the grief Danny still
feels over his untimely death, a grief that we came to share with him
as well as for him.
It also became
clear from the stories that Lou was a
hero. His heroism had nothing to do with macho posturing or worldly
achievements. He was an unassuming man who rarely talked about himself;
he lived and died in obscurity, known only to family and friends. I
have always believed that altruism is one of the few genuine miracles -
generosity of spirit, the decency of ordinary people, the least
recognised virtue. As Albert Camus wrote, "the only means of fighting
the plague is common decency" and it is interesting that he , like Lou
was brought up in conditions of such extreme poverty and hardship that
he could be justified in considering such sentiments a bourgeois luxury.
The first glimpse
I have is in some ways the most vivid
to me. He was a young handsome boy of eighteen who had left his
poverty-stricken village outside Venice in Italy to travel to
Australia. His destination was a mica mine in the desert called the
Billy Hughes mine, 500 kilometres north- east of Alice Springs where
his father worked. The conditions in these mines were described as
among the harshest on earth. His father had sent him
the
fare, as he was to do for all the members of the family except one
sister.
Arriving in the
fierce heat after his long five-day
journey by camel from Alice Springs, Lou asked to see his father, whom
he hadn't seen for seven years. To find himself in
this dusty wasteland must have seemed like being
dropped
onto another planet after the tiny green farm village of his birth. In a little while, the message came back - his
father wasn't going to come up until he finished work for the day. The
young man walked away and, in the privacy of the desert, wept.
Another story,
another glimpse into his heart, has been
told to us many times by members of the family: the
story of how Lou's father refused to send
the fare for one of Lou's sisters because she was an unmarried mother,
and so had brought shame on the family. In those days, during the Depression, such abandonment could have
had serious, even fatal consequences for a young girl with a child.
Back in Italy,
Lou's sister and her baby had been sent in
disgrace from the convent because she refused to give her baby up for
adoption. She arrived at a bus stop, in a bad storm, twenty kilometres
from home. Passers- by took pity on her and gave her a shawl for the
baby. Hours later Lou arrived, soaked through; his bike had broken and
he had walked the rest of the way carrying it. Once he got them home,
the baby was put to sleep in a cradle he had made. In a moral climate
where the girl’s sister and other brother beat her because she had brought shame
on them, Lou at fifteen showed extraordinary strength of mind and
compassion. Years
later, this sister, at eighty years of
age, told Danny how Lou had saved her life and she wept at the memory.
Lou told his
father that all the money he had earned for
the last three years from working in the mine was to be for his
sister's fare, even though he knew what his father's reaction would be.
Later on, during the war, his sister and her child safely in Australia
with the rest of the family, it was payback time. Lou used
to tune in to broadcasts from Italy to hear news and
listen to Italian opera, and his father,
knowing of this habit, travelled to the authorities and denounced him
as a fascist. Lou was arrested and sent to Tatura internment camp for
several months until a wealthy woman friend, benefactor to the Italian
mica miners, interceded on his behalf and proved the charges false. The Italian community was up in arms against
Lou's father, and one miner even attacked him; such was the strong
feeling amongst them at such a betrayal.
It is a measure
of the man that,
years later, he insisted that his family visit his
father every Sunday. I have been to this
house in Carlton, now a trendy terrace- house office,
where his father and mother spent their last years
and the
family gathered regularly for rituals like preparing the pasta sauce
from the home- grown tomatoes and the annual pig-killing for salami. I can imagine the family history always
seething under the rituals of respect. Lou's mother, from all accounts
a strong and saintly woman who suffered terribly at the hands of her
husband, never forgave him for the betrayal of their son, not even on
her deathbed. There is no doubt from all the stories we heard that Lou
genuinely did forgive his father and was a good and considerate son to
him in his old age. Such moral grandeur
seems out of place in modern times.
Other stories,
other fragments. Lou taught himself to
read and write English by hurricane lamp at
night after the day’s work. There is an article about his commitment to
learning in the Melbourne Sun. Around the
same time, he took a dying man by camel on a five- day horror trip to
Alice Springs in a vain effort to save his
life. Rumour had it that the man had contracted syphilis from a donkey
and Lou was too embarrassed to tell the hospital authorities. Again,
when an Aranda friend of his had the bone pointed at him, he got him
drunk and talked to him for hours, saving his life. It is a lovely
thing to imagine him with his irrepressible joie de vivre communicating
his own urgent love of life to the dying man, jolting him back to life.
At the Italian camp, with its camaraderie, the solidarity brought about
by the unbelievable working conditions and hardships, he proved himself
a man of courage even at that young age. He made lifelong friends from
that time, men who would later talk to Danny about him -their abiding
love and respect evident in everything they said.
Another glimpse
of this young uneducated Italian in the
1930’s: his development of a relationship of mutual respect and
intimacy with the local Aranda people. Much later he was to tell Danny
that Aboriginal society was the only genuinely communist one that he
knew of, as they shared everything with one another. He was one of the
first white men to be invited to a local initiation ceremony, and he
talked about it later to Danny as an important experience for him. In those days, when massacres were still in
living memory, and racism was as accepted as the air people breathed,
he had his own luminescent view of the world.
I have from Danny
a
second-hand picture of Lou as a
family man; of his tenderness and attention as a father, of how his
sons never doubted his love for them even though he was always very
strict, of the serious way he set about teaching them to be men. He had the imagination and intelligence to
know that he had to do things with them, show them by example. One of
his main pieces of advice to Danny was to use his initiative. I saw Danny do the same with his own daughters
and heard his father's voice come down through the years as he
patiently answered their questions and played endlessly with them, with
that kind of absolute tenderness I have only seen in Italian men. I
have first- hand knowledge of Lou's success as a father because I know of his son. As a
major influence on Danny's life, Lou taught him to be a man in the full
sense of the word with all the dimensions
of courage and passion, compassion and sensitivity that he thought
necessary. In the finest Italian tradition, a man was not afraid to
show emotion, to think of others, to be kind and honourable as well as brave.
The glimpses of
Lou's life now become a continuum of
stories told to me by Danny, his mother and his brothers: how for
instance he wooed and won a beautiful young girl called Elsa who was
also Venetian. According to Elsa, years
later when she talked to me about him, he was a dashing virile man who
could sing all night at parties, a romantic and passionate lover, a
faithful husband and, though very strict, loving to her and their sons.
He obviously took his duties as husband and father, in his
old-fashioned way, very seriously. Like Danny he was hot-tempered and
stubborn.
Looking at this
life from an
outsider's point of view, his uniqueness lies in this fact. That although he was in many ways a traditional man
of his time and social class, his habit of independent thought,
developed from an early age, allowed him to apply logic to all the
situations he found himself in. In thinking things through so clearly,
he was also able to stay true to the conclusions he reached. There was
another dimension to this intelligence, a quality I can only call
grace. This logic wasn't the cold, mean-spirited, kind
that makes selfishness or greed into a virtue or becomes just another dogmatism in its narrowness. In evaluating a
person or an event in his life, the Aranda people he met, or his
father's brutality, his sister's plight or his fatherhood, his
reactions, it seems to me were not only supremely logical but also
tempered with this grace, born of the compassion and imagination so central to his natural humanity.
This seriousness and consistency of purpose runs
through
his life like a line of fire, and others recognised it in him. I have talked to a large number of people
through the years, both family and friends, and it is clear they still
considered him a hero, the man they went to for advice, a man who in
some way or another had had an important influence in the direction of
their lives.
Lou and Elsa
married and had two sons in Melbourne, Leo
and Roy, before they made the decision to move back up to the Harts
Range to a mine called the Last Chance. Elsa was to remember it as the
best time of her life, the companionship and fun of the Italian mining
community far outweighing the hardships of heat,
snakes and isolation. This view was echoed
by everyone who worked there in those three or four years. Their third
son, Danny, was born in
48- degree heat at the Alice Springs hospital ,and they travelled back
to the camp with their new baby to be greeted by a grand celebration of
music, a feast and dancing to welcome them home.
When Danny was three
they moved, finally, back to Melbourne.
One of Danny's
most vivid memories of his childhood in Melbourne was the shooting
expeditions he went on with his father and a group of his Italian
friends. He was the only son who could get up at dawn, so it was
usually only Danny who came and he enjoyed the chance of having his
father to himself. The strict rules about guns, the tacit expectation
of absolutely impeccable behaviour, the pleasure of being with a group
of men and especially his father, the bush
in the early morning, the excitement of
the pointer dogs: all this was always associated with his
father and the pleasure
Danny took in his company. Lou was a man who delighted in the physical
world; he designed and made all kinds of devices and tools, preparing
his own gunshot, making furniture and teaching his sons as he went. He was always conscious of the importance of
family and was happy in
their company. There were regular family picnics in Melbourne parks:
huge, typically Italian affairs with sixty or seventy people attending.
They sat under the trees at tables covered with white tablecloths, and feasted, drank wine and sang until dark.
These were picnics that Danny remembers nostalgically as breaks from a
quiet suburban working- class life, picnics he recognised much later in
movies like Amarcord.
At forty-six, out of the blue, Lou was made redundant, an event that
was still unusual and a matter of shame in those far-off days before
redundancies became a way of life.
This was very hard for him, a traditional
working man who had always made his own
way and supported his family. He went to Adelaide to try to find some work
and died there of a heart attack, away
from his family, at the home of one of his closest friends. Danny had made a guitar on his father's
work-bench after seeing an Elvis film, and was looking forward to
showing it
to his father when he returned that night. I
feel that in some ways he has never stopped grieving his father: that
afternoon at sixteen years, his life
changed permanently. At the funeral, the church overflowed with
mourners who spilled out into the street. They came from all over
Australia to show their respect.
Years later at a family gathering I saw a lurching, grainy home
movie that showed
several minutes of Lou walking up a
garden path. It was strange to see him in the flesh, as it were. It was
as if I
already knew the stocky, serious, handsome man up there on the screen.
In that
brief time I saw with a shock of recognition the way he bent to examine
something — a stone, a flower — with all the tender concentration I
knew in his
son. In that instant I saw him as a man vividly in the present, and
recognised
Danny’s ability to focus absolutely on whatever has stirred his
curiosity,
irrespective of what is going on around him.
Thus it is, my
strange relationship with the
father-in-law I never knew, who is nevertheless part of my life. The
beautiful
boy weeping on the desert hillside, the courageous young man defying
his father
to protect his sister, the mature man stopping to examine something
with alert
and tender curiosity, the hardworking miner, the father filled with
love for
his sons. The young man alone in the tent at night learning English,
the boy
walking through the rain to bring his disgraced sister home, the
lifelong
Labour voter interested in social justice for the Aboriginal people,
the
romantic lover. The uneducated, irreligious Italian migrant, whose
grasp of
ethics, of how to live an honourable life, was as rigorous as that of
anyone I
know, the man who could sing the songs of his homeland all night with
his
friends, the man who did what he knew was right at considerable cost to
himself, without ostentation or righteousness.
These are all
glimpses, images fleeting as smoke.
There is no way I can guess at the man’s inner life, or who he really
was:
whether, for instance, he would have approved of me as a
daughter-in-law, or
how we would have got on. But I feel close to him through his son,
however
presumptuous that might be, and believe that he has also helped to
teach me,
his daughter-in-law, and our children as well. His life was like a
flame that
warmed all our lives.
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After I wrote the
foregoing piece, Danny was awarded an Australian Film Commission
Writer-Director Fellowship to make a film about
his father. He
decided to return to the place of his
birth in search of the facts of his father’s life there, and, as luck
would
have it, he needed a personal assistant.
In Alice Springs
we met and interviewed some of the
old Italian mica miners who had retired there. One woman told us that
Lou had
lent her the fare to Melbourne, though she had never met him before. We
talked
to an elder of the local Attijere community, Tony Petrick, who
remembered walking
up to the Billy Hughes mine as a small boy and eating the ‘fabulous
tucker’
made by the Italian women. The ‘mad Italians’ were remembered by
everyone we
spoke to with affection and respect.
Our intention in
going to the Northern Territory was
to visit the Billy Hughes mine, where Lou had arrived at 18, and then
to travel
around the rest of the Harts Range, where he had spent the next 20
years. Above
all, though, we wanted to find the Last Chance mine, which he had loved
so
much, and where Danny had lived until he was three.
Danny had
researched for months beforehand and we knew that the Billy Hughes was
remote and inaccessible, on the side of a mountain somewhere in the
desert, but that there was a track of sorts leading to it. The Last
Chance was another proposition altogether, as it no longer appeared on
current maps and no one knew exactly where it was — not even the farmer
who owned the vast station it was lost in. Everyone said that if by
some million-to-one chance we found it there would be nothing there,
except perhaps the mica tailings and maybe the concrete base for the
tent Lou had poured 48 years ago.
The walk to the
Billy Hughes mine turned out to be one
of the most extraordinary I have ever been on. We took our trusty
four-wheel-drive up the foothills of Mt Palmer but the steep track was
like a
creekbed, scattered with boulders, and we had to abandon the vehicle
after a
few nerve-racking hours. We camped for a freezing night on a bleak
slope with
the wind howling until dawn. The next morning we set out on foot. The
track
wound further and further upwards, and every time we reached a crest,
another
range of those wild red hills stretched to the horizon. We thought it
would
never end as we stumbled up in the heat, tripping over the rocks, the
slopes
plummeting away to wild gullies wherever we looked.
We were also in a
state of utter disbelief. How had
the miners brought the mica down in their clapped-out, 1930s truck, how
had
they eaten, how had they lived? They themselves had built the track,
which they
called the Burma Road, an engineering miracle in itself. It was hard
enough
climbing it with light packs on our backs but we knew they had brought
up huge
old heavy compressors and all the other gear, and that they had carried
down
37,000 kilograms of mica from the mine. Those Italian peasant farmers
had
sweated and toiled in unendurable heat, in a wilderness without human
habitation, water or greenery, and they had done it for years. There
was only
heat, brown rocks and scrubby trees — nothing moved except the wind.
And yet
the landscape was utterly radiant. The smell of warm rock and sweet
air, the
miles of endless nothingness wherever you looked, became more and more
hypnotic.
When we
finally
reached the Billy Hughes mineshaft,
which descended into impenetrable darkness, we recognised it by the
great spill
of glittering mica spewed down its side. It was like being on the roof
of the
world. Range upon range of blue fairyland stretched for thousands of
kilometres: 360 degrees of unbroken horizon in a magically beautiful
vista. We
made out two tiny glinting specks in that vast distance — the Harts
Range
police station and the leafy Attijere Aboriginal community — in a
landscape
otherwise bare of any sign of human life. Danny’s father and his father
before
him had worked this mine for years; we were both overcome by the sheer
impossibility of the life they must have led there.
Soon we
became frighteningly lost
- it took just one wrong turn
and suddenly all the steep slopes looked
the same. Our water was low and we were very hot. Luckily our trusty
compass and the sighting of another mica mine which we assumed was the Caruso gave us our bearings again. As we
climbed up the gully trying not to panic, I fully understood why
outback Australians we met had such a
laconic respect for the place: theirs is a visceral understanding of
how quickly you can die if you lose your nerve. (Tony Petrick told us later that
he was on his way up to find us, because
he'd forgotten to mention how dangerous the old mine- shafts were!)
Danny twisted his ankle; and we beat an
undignified and painful retreat; he leaning on my shoulder as we limped
the seven kilometres back to the van, trying to get there before dark.
A few days later
we set out on the centrepiece of the
whole expedition: to find the Last Chance mine, abandoned since 1950.
We knew from old maps and Danny's uncle that it was somewhere in the
middle of the badlands by the Simpson Desert. Everyone had warned us
not to go anywhere on foot without compass,
hat and water, and to leave our names at the police station. It was a region that stretched for hundreds of
kilometres without signposts or roads, only sandy, barely discernible
tracks which branched off mysteriously into the hills. The only way we
could work out directions was by the bores, by the occasional cattle
run and by compass bearings, as all the maps were different. We went down the Eaglebeak Mountain track,
through strange low ranges, sand and mulga; patches of red earth and
the glitter of quartz the only colours. It
was the most unutterably remote, ancient place and made even the Billy
Hughes seem tame. It was so easy to imagine simply disappearing there without anyone knowing or caring.
It was like being on the mountains of the moon
and as impersonal and primal. You were entering another time- zone
where humans were as temporary, insignificant and meaningless as the
stones or the mulga.
We knew from old maps that
there were other mica mines around with names like Desperate and Last
Hope. It gave new meaning to looking for a needle in a haystack as the
monotonous ranges unfolded endlessly. We could only travel through the
sand at 20ks an hour and made several wrong turns, at one stage driving
for an hour straight towards the Simpson Desert before we realised our
mistake. The only break in the visual monotony was the glitter of
quartz in the heat. Some of the turnings we had to take were like
animal tracks, so light, overgrown and impermanent they seemed. We
finally reached the bore we were looking for and camped for the night.
The next morning we travelled back and forth along the track trying to
work out where to go. We took the four-wheel-drive off the track at what we thought was the right spot, parked and began our walk into the wilderness,
dragging a stick behind us like Hansel and Gretel as an added
precaution. We saw the glint of what looked like mica on a low hill
ahead and kept trudging on through the sand for a couple of kilometres,
always mindful of a wrong turning.
Then suddenly and
unexpectedly, below the hill where we had
first seen the
mica, we stumbled on the camp. It was like finding a miniature lost
city deep in a jungle. It was such a miracle that we began running
around ecstatically, shouting out each discovery, laughing and crying,
filming it, thrilled as children. Scattered everywhere were the remains
of the miners’ life:, wine bottles, the stone
forge still standing, corrugated iron, tins, tools like jacks and
braces, even the mining bucket Lou had made himself on the forge. All
the paraphernalia of the mine and the camp were there preserved for
forty years in the pure desert air. It was as though everyone had only just left,
their presence was still so vivid.
Danny
kept seeing his father's handiwork everywhere,
and we couldn't stop marvelling at their ingenuity in the middle of
such isolation and hardship. I felt tenderness and respect for my
mother-in-law who had always loved the
place so much Apparently she used to sing
opera so loudly that the men could hear it in
the mine when they were working. She raised her boys
here for three years, and as the only woman, was always treated with
much appreciation and respect. We found
the concrete pad Lou had poured for their tent, we saw the remains of
the little structures they had lived in, the signs of
domesticity-tobacco tins which Danny recognised as Lou's brand,
saucepans, a tin made into a flour- shaker.
It was like an
oasis. Birds were calling, the air was
fresh and sweet, and in the complete stillness of the desert, red
ranges stretched peacefully as far as the eye could see. Sitting there
in the sun beside the mine that Lou and his mates had worked so long
ago, gazing down onto the little camp, we both understood for the first
time why the years he spent there were the happiest of his life. It had
always been easy to imagine the terrible conditions they lived and
worked in, but it wasn't until we were there that we could actually
feel in everything around us the spiritual satisfaction of such a life.
It became clear
that the landscape had shaped them just
as it had the Aranda people, not only by its extreme harshness, but
also by the primal peacefulness and spirituality. Here in a wilderness
unscarred by civilisation they learnt to survive by themselves and
evolve their own rules, surrounded and refreshed by the beauty and
clarity of the desert. Lou as leader of
the camp had proved that it was possible to do this with style and
harmony, in contrast to the brutal reign of his father at the Billy
Hughes. He had achieved the universal human dream - a little kingdom of
his own in the middle of a desert, an improbable utopia. At the Last
Chance they succeeded, if only for a few years, in banishing the ghosts
of the past-extreme poverty, oppressive fathers and society, the
suffering they had each undergone-and to live in peace.
I could almost
hear the notes of opera drifting up to
where we were sitting, the sounds of children playing, the laughter and
jokes, the sweetness of the few leisure hours after the day’s work as
they sang and told stories around the fire in the desert night.
We made our way
back to the van at sunset, following our
squiggly line in the sand, and carrying Lou's mining bucket awkwardly
between us. He had made it himself on the camp forge, adding a
decorative flourish on the sturdy handle. It had also been mended
carefully with wire and looked as if it
had served the miners for years before they left it under a tree for
us. In the same way, finding the Last Chance had been like breaking
open a time capsule miraculously preserved in the desert. The past that
flooded out on us was as fresh and strong as if it had happened
yesterday, and we both felt very emotional.
In the end , the
memory of a person, the final essence
that remains, is made up of strangely disconnected images, like an
impressionistic painting, glimpses shining out through the fog of the
past. These glimpses, a story here, a split-second image there, add to
that essence in a way that makes nonsense of worldly evaluations about
how much money they made, how 'well' they did, for they assume a moral
dimension. In a way, the processes of memory are as inexorable and
terrible as the religious concept of divine retribution. During a
lifetime, a person's actions, these glimpses, slowly and silently
contribute to this final and inalterable measure of a life. There are a
few people whose lives have been lived with grace, and whose lives are
a reflection of this grace.
In
making
the trip in search of his father, Danny was
able to confirm his own memories: that Lou belonged to that rare
category. Every fact he unearthed, every person he spoke to was further
evidence that his father was intelligent, courageous and had remained
all his life a good and honourable man. As
we walked back across the desert, it felt like both a completion and a
beginning. I had an almost visceral sense of Lou's presence beside his
son, their suffering and love, a memory as evanescent and enduring as
water, the generations of fathers and sons widening out in time like
ripples in a pool.
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