Her flying days were over, but this did not mean that the world could not come to her. The suburbs of Brisbane, where her parents still lived, sometimes came to her. And now, on this surprise visit, the poet’s rural Bunyah. The Bunyah of bush and paddocks and cattle tracks.
When Amanda began at WSU, her professor had read to the class some bush ballads. Not any by Murray but some compulsory Henry Lawson. It was Lawson who would give Amanda the idea for her thesis, though he had died in 1922. Lawson, she learned, had lost his hearing to an ear infection in a boyhood without antibiotics. His deafness, to read Lawson tell it, had driven him into himself and made a writer of him. But this story was little known outside of disability studies; generations of Australians were unaware that the verses they grew up reciting had been composed by a deaf man. It made Amanda wonder which other authors had had their invisible differences erased, smoothed over, ironed out. A whole side of their life’s work silenced. This thought would keep coming back to her, until the day she read Murray and knew at once that she would write about him. Because, in his own way, over forty years, from various angles, he had been writing about her.
An emu’s ‘alert periscope’ and a bat in a cave – to Murray, a ‘tufty, crinkled ear’ – could receive all of her attention; likewise his whales who ‘sing into sight’. Who ‘peer in long low tones … to river-tasting and oil-tasting coasts’. She was moved by a gum tree’s leaves in windy autumn, ‘swapping pace and place in an all-over sway’. As she was by the poet’s admission that his awkward body never danced, save for his hands ‘on bits of paper’.
Naturally it wasn’t all plain reading. Some of the poems had a reputation for being difficult. Certain words might trip up her fingers, cause them to backtrack. Words that were never meant for her (or so people might think) – Gaelic, Aboriginal, colours. But she remained unperturbed. Foreign words she could check in a dictionary. ‘Feallsanachd’ is philosophy. ‘Gnamma’ is a desert rock hole. ‘Yellow’ – which sounds and spells like something out of a native Australian language – is warm like the sun, she knows. Fluffy and honey-smelling like the golden wattle. Happy – quite a few sighted people say – ‘a happy colour’. Loud, say others – ‘that T-shirt is loud’. Having been raised by sighted parents, in a sighted society, Amanda has absorbed all this and more. Absorbed that ripe – but not unripe or overripe – bananas come in the same colour – unlike apples. That mixing yellow paint and blue makes green. That the night confers nearinvisibility on black cats. That colours in poems can be read in multiple ways.
✲
So many marvellous lines the poet recited that evening in the hall, alternately moving and slyly humorous, inviting tears, then laughter, and answered with each.
A bittersweet nostalgia was conveyed in the lines Murray recited to close the reading. Sydney in the fifties. The poet as a fresher from the sticks.
‘When Two Percent Were Students’
Gorgeous expansion of life
all day at the university,
then home to be late for meals,
an impractical, unwanted boarder …
She hadn’t planned to stick around once the reading was over. She would make straight for the door, flag down a taxi on the street and get herself home, still full of the poet’s words. But where on earth were all the taxis when you needed one? While she was waiting with arm outstretched, the reading’s organisers and their guest had followed her out and asked her along to dinner.
‘That’s one invitation I can’t refuse,’ she had said, after a moment’s hesitation, doing her best to keep the nerves out of her voice, since she hardly ever stayed out these days. Indeed, it seemed to her like forever since she had last gone and sat in a restaurant.
Not far to go, luckily. Someone had opened the door and she could hear the drinkers and diners inside, their hubbub as echoes of walls, tables and bottles. She fastened her ears on these, the better to navigate the room, as she entered and let the commotion engulf her.
Amanda could tell from the way the voices at her table gave their orders that they were all seasoned restaurant-goers.
She could scarcely distinguish the voices that addressed her. Nor easily reply to anyone. Words disappeared in the general clamour so that you had to lean in and raise your voice to be heard.
The men (they were all men) had made an effort to include the poet. They had repeated themselves. Yelled, ‘Come again?’ when he failed to speak over the restaurant noise. But his gruff voice would not carry, and in a short time the men retreated to their plates, so that the table divided into two groups, two atmospheres: the men on one side, Murray and Amanda on the other. One side shouting talk and the other staying silent. Not a good silence, Amanda felt, or, at least, not one that was altogether comfortable. Not like the silence they had shared just before the reading. She sensed a desire on the poet’s part to speak, now that the reading was over and he had some food inside him. ‘Nice hall for it, I thought, good sound, don’t you reckon?’ she imagined him saying. If only everyone and their raucous cousin in here would let him get a word in edgewise. The place was getting so loud that she could barely hear herself think. Fortunately, that wasn’t her habit, to hear herself think. Rather she felt her thoughts and the words they formed prickle inside her.
He wouldn’t ask her what she had made of the reading. He wouldn’t ask her when he knew already.
When they had put the poet in a taxi, and shouted hoarse farewells, one of the men said to the others, ‘Perhaps he’d’ve rathered gone somewhere less noisy, Les.’
Amanda repeated to Bruce what the man had said about Murray: ‘He looked really crook.’
At first she thought she must have misunderstood, but she heard the others chiming in, saying, ‘Yeah, poor bloke, didn’t look well, did he?’
‘He is getting on. In his seventies.’
‘Put on even more weight.’
But the poems, thought Amanda. The hour’s worth of poems. All those words that opened rooms within rooms within rooms inside you. Words that took your mind in at least five different directions at once.
She wished the men would say, ‘I loved the line about …’ but they said nothing like it.
The longer they had talked, the older and balder and fatter and sicker a man they turned the poet into, the higher she could feel her temper rise.
What had the poet’s old man looks to do with anything? He hadn’t come for a medical, or to rouse anyone’s pity.
‘Poor Les,’ they had said.
‘Poor Les yourself,’ she had felt like saying back.
‘What are youse on about, I wanted to say, it’s completely beside the point. Should I have done?’ she said to Bruce, who had been rinsing their mugs in the sink.
‘No, they wouldn’t have got it.’
That had been her thought too. They would only have gone silent on her and paid no notice. And anyway, she had remembered then their kindness to invite her along like that and felt better disposed towards them.
And it was not like any of their remarks had been news to her. She had read such a portrait in Murray’s own self-deprecating words, part of his recent output. But she disliked them coming from anyone else.
The simple truth was, she had never much cared for appearances. A person’s looks – pretty or ugly or pretty ugly – being neither here nor there. Only once or twice, in her teens and twenties, had she bothered with make-up or clothes thought fashionable in imitation of sighted people (and some blind she knew), and neither experiment had lasted very long.
She remembered, from back in primary and high school, sighted girls feuding pointlessly over their favourite heartthrobs. ‘He’s five foot eight,’ a girl would say of this or that screen or pop star. ‘He’s so not,’ another would retort, ‘more like five foot seven and a half.’
She’d remembered this in the taxi home from the reading. It had made her laugh.
✲
Woolloongabba. Not a word Amanda could ever forget, even now. She had started school – a school for the blind – there. Twenty minutes or so in the taxi from her parents’ home.
Her mother had worked in an office as a typist. Her father sold automobile spare parts, and would later give tours of Brisbane on his motorcycle.
