The Contemptuary. David Foster
Hill Crematorium, have a couple of speakers set up outside the now-deconsecrated chapel, but the amp isn’t properly working so we can’t hear all that’s said. We hear enough. We hear the music, selected by Mumbles who died of cancer in the Canberra Hospice; Jailhouse Rock for the note of manly levity, It’s a Wonderful World to bring a tear to the eye, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door from Guns and Roses. I stood apart among the headstones of the Catholic religious who are buried there in their hundreds. I’d never before been to the place, didn’t know it existed. You drive past the gaol towards Tarlo and turn left at the hostelry of Patrick Confoy.
A few one-pippers are glancing my way invitingly but I ignore them. They didn’t have to vote me off the island, friends; I took a powder. Perhaps they imagine I’m a former inmate planning a disturbance. Built like Brad Thorn, Mumbles; six-foot-six, nineteen stone and a bit of a short fuse. Give an Islander Yard gaffer pause, the prospect of a blue with Mumbles. Mumbles began working life, as we heard from Ron, as a mechanic in Barry. No little Australian boy dreams of becoming a screw. Some of us are former jumbo pilots, some master mariners, some butchers, some graziers, all lured by the prospect of steady pay for doing bugger-all with untold overtime. In the early noughties you could pull a six-figure annual wage at Long Bay.
Whereas today, when they lock down X-wing, they leave it unattended overnight.
In his final posting Mumbles departed to become a desk jockey, assistant commish, while I stayed on until the DIC witnessed on my first night overwhelmed me. It took a while.
It may have been suspected I was a dog breeder. In his retirement Mumbles devoted himself to the breeding of dogs, and we heard from Ron how he wouldn’t just sell a dog to anyone: you had to satisfy him that you were a fit and proper person to own a dog. A young female two-striper had a Neapolitan mastiff on a short leash, which in due course entered the ex-chapel to pay its last respects to its breeder.
I got on well with Mumbles. We shared some hard times but we also shared a liking for the phrase ‘these cuffs are too tight’. Back in the late eighties before CCTV, we had twenty-five deaths — murders, suicides, ODs — within the space of two years, and you should see the paperwork for any Death in Custody. It is big.
To cite one instance; a young man, who’d OD’d on ’done and benzos, acquiring his benzos presumably via the hairy handbag, wasn’t on the MMT. So someone who was had regurgitated methadone syrup in payment of a favour and does it taste foul, but off the ’done, out of gaol, back to using, back to gaol: the well-worn path. Mumbles didn’t leave the district when he retired as governors usually do. A former inmate of my acquaintance was astounded to encounter him in a Woolworths’ aisle. ‘Hello Mr Sheehan’ says the ex-inmate. ‘Call me Mumbles,’ mumbles Mumbles.
Son of Man can these ashes arise, can these ashes live again?
Then prophesy upon these ashes and say, O ye dry ashes when
Ye took a turn in the cinerary urn, Hold on says Ezekiel
Thy Word has not been heard since fire pulverized the bone
So when the last trump sounds I fear
Nary a cupboard door may stir
Alligator pair
I often drive to Canberra on Sunday after Mass as it’s an easy drive from Goulburn, and scenic too, if you like Hereford cattle and Lombardy poplar. I can drive home through Stunnedaroo and Stunning. I wouldn’t want to live in Canberra: a warder has to knock on your door at Alexander Maconochie, that’s the prison they named after the Norfolk Island Gaoler. If too drunk to drive, I will check myself into University House to rest my paws on the butterbox joints of a Fred Ward wingback easy chair that would have been fashioned of Blackwood by one of Jennings’ Germans, though many of Jennings’ Germans were actually Dutch resistance. Putting the past as best they could behind in 1950, Jennings’ Germans ventured to a Canberra then the size of Goulburn, to hypostatise for Fred his unique, bespoke furniture that confers the comfy Modernist ambiance on the ANU. My father rather fancied himself a frustrated cabinetmaker and took me as a boy on many a visit to old Acton. We would sneak abashed in and out of various buildings.
Weather being fine, I may cycle or stroll round the lake, which takes a couple of hours by cycle if you ride out through the Jerrabomberra Wetlands. I acknowledge a frisson to see a gowned man sitting in the garden of the hospice. I search his face for signs.
In the case of rain, I might browse in the National Library, depress myself. Once in a while I used to take in a film at the Arc Cinema, pretty much out of action these days owing to budgetary constraints, which is a shame, although the Sunday viewers, myself included, were mostly flashing a concession card. The Cinema, which is in the National Film and Sound Archive building, used to be the Institute of Anatomy, had Phar Lap’s heart on display, is a fine example of Monaro Art Deco, and ran in its final season a selection of Ingmar Bergman films, most of them new thirty-five millimetre prints courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, that focussed on the relationship between Bergman and Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, one of the many actresses with whom he’d enjoyed a tread albeit his main muse. I viewed the entire season, because I recall seeing Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring at the Savoy in Bligh Street when I was new to Sydney during my undergraduate days. It was the only venue in Sydney screened non-English foreign films. I saw the paedophile Roman Polanski’s debut at the Savoy. You could buy a coffee in the foyer as well, it was the acme of sophistication. It closed in the early seventies along with the old Adyar Bookshop that stood nearby.
‘We all want to fuck young girls,’ observed Polanski in his own defence. He was using the word broadly: he sodomised her as well, having first drugged her.
I’m pretty sure it was in a Bergman film I first heard anyone speak in a non-Latin foreign tongue. To this day I delight in the intonation of the Swedish tongue on the rare occasions I hear it.
I once had a Swedish mule in my wing who’d never set eyes on the Wide Brown Land. He had to conjure it up from what he could hear beyond the wall. Arrested at the airport, taken straight to Goulburn.
How comforting to hear again the Swedish tongue and to see once more those vivid, wind-swept pines on the Baltic isle upon which Bergman shot so many of his seminal black and white features, and how very slow-moving those features seem today. It was on the stony beach in front of Bergman’s Faro farmhouse that the knight, played by a typically grim and gaunt Max von Sydow, had his fateful game of chess. Walking back to my vehicle having just watched Saraband, shot in 2003, Bergman’s final film as director starring Liv Ullmann at sixty-five, the older the fiddle the sweeter the tune, I realised for the first time that the impact Bergman’s films had upon me as a teenage virgin was largely attributable to the close-ups of the face of Liv Ullmann. Why, even now in my seventies, I could recognise every freckle as she faced off against Max von Sydow in Shame, filmed in ’68. I wonder to what extent other cinephile ephebes may have imprinted on Ullmann, thanks to Bergman, as the archetype of feminine allure. Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer, prefers natural light, which doesn’t amount to much in those hyperborean latitudes, and focusses heavily, in every film he shoots, on facial expression, notably those of Bergman’s paramours, Liv, Harriet, Bibi et al. And we now know what we merely suspected back in the mid-sixties, that the human being sees a human face through dedicated facial-recognition software, quite distinct from other components of the visual optics. A face is not an arse, whence I guess the proscription on doggy sex in the Holy Kabbala. In his screenplays Bergman flaunts his ‘Stradivarius’, which is what he called her, she tells us so herself, and seeing again at the Arc such a paean to Ullmann as Persona, I recall how I felt with my face so close to hers when she would have been in her twenties. I recall my awe at what I should have deemed our unaccountable proximity, as well as the deference I would have shown any man who seemed to interest her, which in those days was Bergman, with whom at the time she was brawling in the aforementioned Faro farmhouse off the Gotland coast. In Dheeraj Akolkar’s 2013 documentary, Liv and Ingmar: Painfully Connected, Ullmann at seventy-five complains with a smile of what a recluse he was, what a terrible temper he had, how he wouldn’t let her off the isle