Although stranger things have happened, especially in Adelaide.
Chapter Five
Examining the verifiable facts of the Tamam Shud case has, so far, only uncovered further layers of impenetrable – not to mention downright bizarre – mystery. At this point I am tempted to shrug dismissively and say, ‘That’s Adelaide’. However, for those who only know Adelaide from the outside, as a city of culture or a glorified country town, I need to explain what I mean by that. And for the insiders, I need to begin by establishing my own Adelaide credentials.
I used to come into Adelaide tired and dirty and, for the moment, cashed-up. I worked as a grape picker, which was good money, much better than a factory, and kept you out in the open air (along with the mosquitos, sandflies, snakes and other pests). I used to take the train from Melbourne and get picked up by the winery’s furniture van at Central Station, all clean and eager. They would cart the gang of us out to sleep in a shearing shed and cut grapes all day, every day.
It was monotonous work but not heavy and, after a while, soothing. Grape pickers don’t have to carry the grapes on their back but, rather, drop the cut cluster over their shoulders into a bag resting on the ground, which can be pulled along between the rows. I had tried other crops, apples and pears and soft fruits – you have to climb. Strawberries – you have to bend and crucify your back. Grapes – you don’t have to pull; you just clip the stem and the round, smooth, warm globes fall into your hand. I preferred the wine grapes, because it didn’t matter if they got slightly mangled, whereas every table grape had to be perfect. I could work faster on wine grapes.
I wore jeans, boots, gloves, a heavy flannelette shirt of my father’s and a straw hat – the last to general amusement. No one wore hats then. Thus protected from the weather, I motored along the row with my name on it, finding grapes where they hid themselves under the leaves, listening to the birds singing and the boss swearing and my fellow workers yelling tidbits of information across the rows. I had no partner. I was there for isolation and silence and, of course, money. I watched with great pleasure as they emptied my bag into the hopper, wrote down the weight and freed me to go back to the shed, take a cold shower, make myself some sort of dinner and sleep like a log.
I would do this for two weeks or as long as the vintage lasted. I spent nothing because there was nothing to spend anything on. I did develop a dislike for grapes and my clipping hand still aches a little at the memory. But it was all worth it when the van deposited me once more at Central Station and I went into the Railway Hotel for my one night of luxury. Near the station I purchased a pumice stone and soap. I always bought exotic scents; my favourite was called Rose de Gueldy. I also bought Pears shampoo for my hair, which was stiff with sweat and grime. I wouldn’t have let me into a respectable hotel but the Adelaide hotels were used to pickers. And in my pack I had night clothes, slippers, cosmetics and proper garments in which I would not mind being seen.
I would ascend to my room, lock the door, and run a huge bath, as hot as I could bear. Then I would peel off my frightful clothes and immerse myself, head and all, and start scrubbing. Sometimes I would have to drain and re-run the bath twice before I got back to my usual skin tone. Then I would wrap myself in hotel towels and lie down for a nap on my clean bed with sheets. Removing all that grime was exhausting. I felt as the sailors must have felt in The Weary Whaling Grounds as sung by Danny Spooner.
After that it was time to put on my clean clothes and sandals and wander out into Central Market to see what was available. I would have been eating bread and tinned soup, so now I was avid for real tastes, real fruits – except grapes – and above all, meat. Central Market was a good place for a carnivore in those days. There was a pub that served steaks so big that they overlapped the edges of the plate, the first chargrill I ever tasted.
I used to buy a steak and a glass of red wine and eat my way through that steak, nibbling and nibbling until I had absorbed it all. Every meaty morsel. Every proteinladen bite. Then I would stagger back to the hotel, have another bath out of sheer swank, and next morning eat the hotel breakfast and get on the train for Melbourne.
That used to be all I would see of Adelaide, although later, when I had friends in the town, I used to go there for fun, because I had made enough money folk singing and cleaning houses to tide me over the holidays. That first brief glimpse had told me Adelaide was a big, sleepy country town, not unpleasant or unfriendly. But my dad’s stories told me different. Adelaide, he said, had a dark underside. Children vanished there. Strange things happened. He always told me to be very careful in Adelaide.
The first thing a native of Adelaide tells you proudly is that Adelaide was built without convicts. All volunteers, free settlers, not like your grimy crime-ridden hovels. It’s named after a queen. (No sniggering there at the back, please). It’s clean, planned and bright, with Colonel Light on his pedestal in the middle, supervising the activities of the devout citizenry. It’s the City of Churches.
And yet. Colonel Light’s statue is not in the middle of the city – he’s at the top of it, in North Adelaide. The city has no heart. The reason why it is a city of churches is not that the citizenry is necessarily devout but that, historically, Adelaide was settled by large numbers of protestant sects, who would arrive, build a church, have a schism and then build another church down the road, within convenient sneering distance of the unenlightened original. It’s like the joke about the Welsh Robinson Crusoe, who is finally found and exhibits the town he has built out of bamboo to his rescuers. There is the town hall, the bakery, the fish shop and two chapels. ‘Why two chapels?’ asks the rescuer (obviously English or he wouldn’t need to ask). ‘That’s the one I don’t go to,’ says Taffy the Shipwrecked.
And so it was in Adelaide. There are the beautiful main churches and, in the back streets, there are the rusty tin sheds of the others. This, oddly enough, made it a progressive city. Protestant progressives of the time wanted to free the slaves and bring about peace on earth and good will to all men, even if they were female. Women in South Australia got the vote in 1894, including indigenous women, at a time when Aborigines were not counted in the census and did not have the vote anywhere else. South Australians also invented a very sensible system of land holdings called the Torrens System, which was adopted all over Australia and made life as an articled clerk bearable. (Old law title searches were murder and got parchment fragments all over your clothes. Until you’ve tried to get powdered vellum out of a white shirt you haven’t laundered.) Anything that has been tried out in Adelaide and accepted, from legislative changes to new salad dressings of a major fast-food chain, will be acceptable to the rest of the country. If it fails in Adelaide, it will fail in the rest of Australia.