Ida Rentoul Outhwaite - Australian Fairy Tales

 This short story involves the characters of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and also Henry Handel Richardson. It was first published in my collection 'The Essential Bird' 2005, and Maggie Millar recently performed it at the Woodend Arts Festival 2015. 

NOW IDA HAUNTS THE CAR PARK

In certain lights you can see the impression of a vanished building hanging in the air. The towers and turrets and chimneys of what appears to be a fairy castle may come into view in the mad blue flash of lightning or at the turning point of dusk or dawn. You look up, uncertain of what you have seen, and it is gone, a fanciful silver image fading on the square reality of day, the strange obscurity of night. You imagine you might have glimpsed movement behind the tower window - a hand, the turn of a head, the gentle swaying of a velvet curtain. In the very dead of night it is sometimes possible to catch on the ear the sound of vanished laughter or the faintest tinkle of a bell.

A paving stone under your foot tells you in bold gold type that on this site there stood a college for young ladies, founded, it says on the stone, in 1875, demolished in 1966. In place of the absent castle is a vast white assembly hall where gatherings of men meet to perform occult rituals. Nearby, the Day Procedure Centre of a hospital in which human babies can be brought into being by astonishing modern technology and thought.

Deep in the earth underneath these visible buildings is a place for parking cars, a kind of layer cake joined through the middle by an elevator. The elevator has a voice all of its own, a disconcerting hollow voice, announcing in its strange blank way the names of all the elevator’s destinations, such as ‘basement three’ or ‘ground level’. Underneath the very bottom of the car park is a little stream of running water which connects this world with the next.

Young ladies who vanished long ago, taking their easels and their violins and their tennis racquets, sometimes come back to this place of happy memory, of former life. Girls such as Ida or Nellie or Henry - an odd name for a girl, but she is a writer, and the times being what they are or were, she felt the need for a man’s name in a man’s world. In one of Henry’s books she told the story of her schooldays - the  title of the book was The Getting of Wisdom. These days Henry haunts the State Library where she is doing the research for a trilogy to be published at the turn of the present century. It will be a great Australian saga (inspired by events that have taken place since 1950) produced on CD rom. The title of this one is, you will have guessed, The Forgetting of Wisdom.

Nellie is an opera singer who was celebrated throughout the world. On odd occasions she has spent an evening in the car park elevator, singing the ‘basement one-two-three’ and ‘ground level’ lyrics to the astonishment of the public. Many of the people who heard her were returning from the bars nearby, and so they were inclined to treat her as an hallucination, a large woman in a beaded gown singing in the elevator. In nineteen hundred and seven, Nellie was the President of the Old Collegians Association, and when she materialised on the other side she was re-elected to this position for eternity. The Association is one of the most active organisations on the other side of the water. It is in fact as a member of the Old Collegians that Ida haunts the car park. It is her job to see that the presence of the old school is maintained on the spot.

Ida is a painter. She does delicate pictures of fairies with the fabulous wings of butterflies and other insects. She has illustrated books for children, and once was asked to paint her joyful pictures on the walls of schools and hospitals. Dressed as a fairy in a dark blue tea-gown, she haunts the hospital and the car park. There is a bright hint of mischief in her eyes which sparkle. She carries a large handbag that is shaped like a butterfly’s wing, embroidered with silks the colour of the sunset and studded with sapphires from the heavens and pearls from the depths of the sea. In her handbag she keeps a wand made from a long stalk of evening primrose, and a telephone of morning glory. The technology of these things is primitive in the extreme - the telephone must be connected to the bright blue fire extinguishers in the car park before it will work. The evening primrose has the power, when waved, to stop the elevator between floors. Before doing a tour of the hospital, Ida always gives Nellie a call to let her know she has arrived safely.

Ida’s outline behaves like that of the old school building - now you see her, now you don’t. However, one day she discovered that people who are suffering from the pain of a lost love are gifted with the sight to see her in all her radiance and beauty.

She was standing in the elevator, wincing at the hollow sound of ‘basement three’ when a distinguished-looking fellow with silver hair and sad pale eyes got in. The white silk scarf around his neck slipped and slithered to the floor. He seemed distracted, didn’t appear to notice that the scarf had fallen. Without thinking, Ida stooped down and picked it up. She then realised he could see her, and she knew therefore he must be suffering. She handed him the scarf, he smiled sadly, the corners of his lovely eyes crinkling as he did so. Ida’s heart missed a beat and she felt she had to act at once. She whisked out her evening primrose and there, between the ground and basement one, the elevator settled gently to a halt.

‘I do believe we’re stuck,’ he said. And he began to press the buttons on the wall. Nothing happened. They introduced themselves - his name was Lawrence, Lawrence Honey - and he explained he was on his way to Lodge. Which Lodge is that, she asked in innocence, and he told her he belonged to a society called the Invisible Lodge. She said she liked the name of that, and then she explained she was a volunteer, a visitor to the hospital. He said he hoped she didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, stuck there in the elevator, hanging by a thread between the floors. She said she wasn’t frightened. My ex-wife, he said, and tears came to his eyes, my ex-wife Georgina was terrified of things like this. She was very young - always insisted that we use the stairs. As you can see, I miss her. You must excuse me, he added, and took out his handkerchief and wiped away his tears, and then he opened up his attache case and took out a silver flask from which he drank. A nip? he said, and handed it to Ida. She took a swig of brandy and felt it go straight to her head. They both began to laugh, and then he offered her a bite of his peanut butter sandwich. My secretary, he said, always insists that I bring a sandwich with me on Lodge night. She’s a most practical woman - makes the sandwich for me. I think you’ll find it satisfactory. And it was.

We’re moving - are we moving? he said this several times and Ida felt it prudent to give the evening primrose an imperceptible wave. The elevator slid gently into motion and they arrived at the ground floor. The security guard at the front desk woke up from a little dream he had been having, unaware that on his elevator monitor he had just missed something that resembled a scene from a silent movie - a man and a woman both in evening dress having a sort of picnic between floors.

Ida found that her imagination was gripped by Lawrence. Ida had fallen in love in that brief time between the ground floor and basement one. She was moved also by the thought of the obvious cruelty of his ex-wife Georgina. Ida would comfort Lawrence; he would not have to weep again. She dashed down to a fire extinguisher and plugged in her morning glory. Nellie, Nellie, she said, all excitement. I’m bringing someone home to dinner. A simply lovely man. I met him in the elevator on his way to Lodge. Do we have cognac - I think he would like that.

It is a coincidence, Ida said to Lawrence in the elevator when he was going home after Lodge, that we should meet again. They both laughed and hoped the thing wouldn’t stick between the floors. You have your car? he said, and Ida said that actually she didn’t have a car - had something else to show him. Perhaps he didn’t realise, but the very latest thing to do was to travel round the city by underground waterway. He said he thought he had read about it somewhere. Perhaps is was in the colour supplement of the Saturday paper.

Lawrence Honey, as if in a trance, stepped into the rowing boat. He felt a drowsy humming feeling running through his blood. The beautiful woman, so reminiscent of a fairy from a ballet or a picture book, took the oars, and smiled. He smiled. The small black attache case of the Invisible Lodge slipped silently from his hand into the water.

They found the attache case caught in weeds some miles downstream. They never found a body. Vanished into thin air. The white silk scarf embroidered with Lawrence’s own secret symbol turned up at the State Library some years later. A baby boy who was manufactured in the hospital was named Lawrence Honey Hamilton in a gesture of reparation for the man who disappeared. And in certain lights you can imagine that you see a gorgeous fairy and a man in evening dress as they step into a little rowing boat on the water underneath the car park that is underneath the Day Procedure Centre.

The Love of Libraries

THE LOVE OF LIBRARIES

I was asked this morning what it is I love about libraries. Here is my response. And I am adding an image that appeared on twitter today. It seems to illustrate my story.

I grew up in Launceston where the public library was in an elegant Georgian building, in one corner of which was a separate children’s library. It had a wonderful goldfish tank. It was a magical place with avenues of books and books and books on shelves. I could go into a kind of trance. My older sister was a great reader and she used to borrow books from the children’s library. She borrowed books by Georgette Heyer and Charles Dickens – among others, but these were the names I knew. Occasionally I would go there with her, but because I was not yet seven, I was not allowed to be a member, not allowed to borrow books. I became so distressed about this that my father decided to take me into the adult library next door where he said I could choose a book and use his card. So, holding my father’s hand, I moved on air along the pavement from one level of paradise  where I was forbidden to taste the fruit, to a higher level where I could pick my own apple. This was a golden place in which the shining shelves of books went forever up into a high vastness. We climbed a spiral staircase. Somewhere at the top of this my father found for me the works of Charles Dickens, as I had requested. Choose one, he said. You can have any one you like. I looked for good pictures, and I found Dolly Varden in ‘Barnaby Rudge’. This was it. I carried it down to the desk, and I borrowed ‘Barnaby Rudge’. I don’t remember many occasions on which I wept, during my childhood. But I do recall the great sorrow and the terrible tears I shed as I was later confronted by the text of ‘Barnaby Rudge’. For although I could read quite a few of the words, I could make no sense at all of any of it.

Interview by Danielle Wood

Birds, butterflies and beating hearts

by Danielle Wood

First Published in The Weekend Tasmanian, August 29, 2015

In the world of one of Carmel Bird’s best-loved and most anthologised short stories, ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, a ‘toy fact’ is a particular kind of truth – the truth according to the writer of fiction.

A toy fact can be absolutely true, or not quite. And even if it is a very long way from being true, then it will be so seductive that it ought to be. For Bird, such facts are the gorgeous, vivid scraps of stuff out of which stories are made.

Here is a toy fact: Carmel Bird and the cabbage white butterfly both arrived in Tasmania in the year 1940. Carmel sprang from her parents – her mother a creative soul and her father a Launceston optician with the magnificent name Will Power. As for the cabbage white: it came from Europe, via mainland Australia, and few gardeners relish the sight of the species’ slender green caterpillars on their brassicas.

Here is another fact, one that seems to chime quite nicely with caterpillars, butterflies and the transformative process that joins and separates them: Carmel Bird was born Janice Maureen Power, and Janice she remained while growing up in Launceston and studying to be a teacher of English and French. She took her birth name with her when she left Tasmania in 1963, but if getting married and then divorced taught her anything, it was that surnames could be acquired and abandoned with relative ease. And if this were true of surnames, then why not of first names, too?

‘I liked the music of Carmel. I did not especially like the music of Janice,’ Bird said.

As Carmel Bird, she has turned her mischievous, witty, dark, light, fierce attention on just about everything. She has written and edited more than 30 books, been thrice short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award (with The White Garden, Red Shoes, and Cape Grimm), and inspired countless other writers through her how-to manuals (including Dear Writer and Not Now Jack – I’m Writing a Novel).

Although she moved away from Tasmania in the early 1960s – and now lives in Castlemaine in country Victoria – she has never really, truly left her birthplace behind. The two new books she has released this year, Fair Game: a Tasmanian Memoir and the short fiction collection My Hearts are Your Hearts contain plenty of evidence of how deeply the island’s trademark triangle is imprinted on Bird’s imagination.

‘I was born in Tasmania early in World War 2. In our bomb shelter there were maps ­– very pretty – of the world, and there was weeny little Tasmania, way away from where the war was. And there was also a huge map of Tasmania. I really loved the shape. I imagine that could be where my personal obsession with the place began,’ Bird said.

‘Because it was left off many maps, and was treated as a joke, and because the perspective my family and associates had of the world was focused far away (the war), it came to be that I perceived Tasmania as unreal. And I thought it was thrilling that I, being marvellously real myself, was roaming around in this non-existent place.’

When she ‘flew the island’, she took Tasmania and all its fairy-tale associations with her, hidden in a ‘fabulous, fictional capsule’ in her memory. And there, it has continued to echo.

Since she was fifteen years old, and possibly even earlier, Bird has been squirrelling away references to Tasmania from the obscure corners of world literature and popular culture.

Underlined in Bird’s 1950’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts are the lines: ‘She had been born, but it was only gossip said so, in Tasmania: her grandfather had been exported for some hanky-panky mid-Victorian scandal’. In his autobiography, Hans Christian Andersen describes how a Lady Blessington keeps ‘a Tasmanian blackbird’ on her balcony. Small matter, Bird says, that there’s no such thing as a ‘Tasmanian blackbird’. The important thing, to Andersen, was that the warbling creature came from an unknown and exotic corner of the globe.

Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Nabokov, Agatha Christie and Noel Coward (‘I once had an aunt who went to Tasmania’) are also represented in Bird’s Tasmaniana snippet collection.

‘Tasmania [is] a name, a location, that pops up in literature when a writer seeks a far off, inconsequential, mythical or gruesome place to insert into the prose,’ Bird writes in Fair Game, her own most recent literary return to the island, and a story that began – like Bird herself – in association with butterflies.

A watercolour image of butterflies arrived some years ago in Bird’s mailbox, on a postcard. These butterflies have now taken up residence on the cover of Fair Game, a slender volume that has been exquisitely produced by boutique publisher Finlay Lloyd as part of its ‘Smalls’ series.

The image is from a cartoon lithograph titled ‘E-migration or a flight of fair game, 1832’, by English artist Alfred Ducote. A close look reveals that the butterflies are in fact women: their wings large, their feet tiny, their elaborate Georgian hair-dos adorned with tiny crowns.

But what Ducote is satirising – and what Bird has written about in her memoir – is far from a beautiful scene. In 1832, 200 young women were sent from England to Van Diemen’s Land aboard the ship Princess Royal – the first large group of non-convict women to make the journey – to become wives and servants in a colonial society suffering from a desperate gender imbalance.

In Ducote’s image, the butterfly women are being swept off the English cliffs by women with brooms. What awaits them in Van Diemen’s Land are men with butterfly nets, their speech bubbles exclaiming: ‘I spies mine’, or ‘I spies a prime ’un’. But these details are small and difficult to see.

‘It takes a very close look and a magnifying glass to release the narrative of the journey they are making from a hostile England to a rapacious Van Diemen’s Land,’ Bird writes. ‘It is not a joyful picture; it is a depiction of a chapter in a tragedy.’

Fair Game is a deceptive book, full of tangential musings, personal recollections and gossipy Tasmanian detours (‘I went to school with…’, ‘I once briefly dated…’), but by the last page, the final layer of has been removed and the reader has been brought face-to-face with the truth of what happened to many of those young women who crossed the world, poor and desperate, only to discover that they were absolutely ‘fair game’.

Bird has dedicated the memoir to her father, and also to Lucy Halligan, daughter of Bird’s close friend, the writer Marion Halligan. Before Lucy died in 2004 of complications from a life-long heart complaint, she was in the habit of sending postcards; it was she who sent the butterfly women to Bird, with a characteristically lively note on the reverse.

It’s hard not to hear the beats of Lucy’s ‘faulty heart’ echoing through Bird’s other new release, the short fiction collection Your Hearts are My Hearts. The hearts that Bird excavates in these stories might be anything from chocolate hearts wrapped in scarlet foil and displayed in a bowl, to transplanted body-part hearts, to the island of Tasmania itself, whose shape, in Bird’s ‘heart of heart…resembles that of a love heart’.

A private girls’ college in Deloraine, an artist’s home in the Huon Valley, and a second-hand imaginary version of Queenstown are among the Tasmanian locations that have made their way into the stories.

‘I didn’t have a rigid scheme for the collection, but the motif of the heart weaves and flickers through the narratives, and the stories do quietly sing to each other,’ Bird says.

Whether she is writing short stories or novels, it is all part of the same endless piece of string for Bird.

‘The first short story I ever read was “The Fly” by Katherine Mansfield. This was in Year Eleven and “The Fly” was a revelation to me. I have been a student and a practitioner of the form ever since. I will hear something, or observe something, and ­– ping! ­– something goes off in my mind, and a whole lot of details and recollections and voices gather, and I start to write a story,’ Bird said.

‘I also love reading and writing novels. I work on a novel and I write short stories at the same time, because I can’t help myself. My whole attitude to life, I suppose, is that of a writer of fiction, and I am, as it were, on the job all the time.’

I first met Carmel Bird in the pages of ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, which hooked me with its opening description of women ‘magging’ over a paling fence, passing between themselves ‘hot scones wrapped in tea-towels, cups of sugar, bowls of stewed plums and a continuous ribbon of talk’.

But our second meeting – on paper, still – was a profound one for me. I had just given up my job in Hobart and was driving across the Nullabor Plain towards Perth and an uncertain plan to start writing fiction. It was January and my car had no airconditioner and by the time I reached Kalgoorlie, I was so hot that I didn’t care where I spent the daylight hours so long as it was indoors, and cool.

I found the library. I found Bird’s Not Now Jack ­– I’m Writing a Novel, and since then I have had total faith in the truism ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear’. Bird taught me, through the pages of that book, about the concept of suspending observations from life in the ‘marvellous clear jelly’ of fiction (and included a recipe for Japonica Jelly as well). She told me, firmly, that ‘real writers don’t have mothers’, which meant that I could not expect anyone to hold my hand or mop my fevered brow; I must just get on with it, alone. She urged me to give up housework. Her advice – on writing, and on the writing life – was and is golden to me.

While interviewing her for this article, I asked – somewhat nervously – about the how-to books, including my beloved Not Now Jack. They weren’t, were they, just something she did – the way writers sometimes must – to pay the rent?

‘No!’ she exclaimed, to my great relief. ‘No, they were much more than that. I loved writing them.’

Bird was first asked to teach a creative writing course in the early 1980s, a time when the concept of teaching creative writing was very new in Australian tertiary institutions. Soon she was also assessing manuscripts for the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. This process was anonymous and Bird was given the moniker ‘Number Eight’, with which she signed her reports.

Much of the advice in Bird’s how-to books came directly from the reports that ‘Number Eight’ wrote for real life writing hopefuls. The advice is enduring, and when Dear Writer was recently re-released (as an e-book and in paperback), the only details Bird really needed to change were to do with the march of technology in the publishing industry.

Bird has never been afraid of embracing technology, either within the worlds of her fiction, or in the way her work is presented to the world. She was the first Australian writer to have a website (her current site hosts a link to the original, ‘vintage’, model) and her book Red Shoes was issued with a CD-ROM appendix, at a time when such a thing was cutting edge technology.

‘I think communication, medical and space technology are all wonderful, but it’s also clear that technical progress is double-edged,’ Bird said.

‘Since at least World War 2 it has been more or less clear that the world is probably on a dizzy trip to disaster…the extinction of species, loss of crops, starvation, millions of refugees, the rise of sea levels, wild weather events. Bits of this get into my fiction, of course.’

Having just read Fair Game and My Hearts are Your Hearts, my mind is jostling with the many, many ‘bits’ – beautiful and terrible – that make their way into Bird’s fiction. There’s a $6000 raincoat from Paris, a monkey on the loose at a garden party, a retinue of faded Beatrix Potter figurines on a child’s grave, the broken insect that is the body a 15-year-old girl on the deck of the Princess Royal. And there’s Bird’s father Will Power standing in a Launceston garden on the day of an eclipse, comforting his little blonde daughter, who has just smashed a precious piece of green glass.

Look, Bird always seems to be saying to her readers. Look.

Carmel Bird will appear in two sessions of the forthcoming Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival in Hobart.

·      ‘Our Heart is Her Heart’, in conversation with Danielle Wood, 2.30-3.30pm, Saturday, September 12, Hadleys Orient Hotel. Tickets, $15/$10, available from www.taswriters.org

·      ‘Short, Sharp Shreds’, a short story celebration with Adam Ouston and Robbie Arnott, 3.45-4.45pm, Sunday, September 13, Hadleys Orient Hotel. Tickets, $20/$15, available from www.taswriters.org

As a fledgling writer Danielle Wood encountered Carmel Bird in the pages of Bird’s how-to book, Not Now Jack – I’m Writing a Novel, and immediately took her advice to heart. Danielle, a former Mercury journalist, is the author of books including the Vogel Award-winning The Alphabet of Light and Dark, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, Housewife Superstar: the very best of Marjorie Bligh and Mothers Grimm. With Heather Rose, she is ‘Angelica Banks’, author of the Tuesday McGillycuddy books for children: Finding Serendipity, A Week Without Tuesday and the forthcoming Blueberry Pancakes Forever. Danielle lives in Hobart with her family and a menagerie of creatures great and small. She teaches writing at the University of Tasmania.

Have You Seen This Child

Conference: “Grounding the Sacred”

Australian Catholic University, July 2015

Speaker: Carmel Bird

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

First I will tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a Spanish princess who travelled in a coach all the way from Spain to Bohemia where she married a prince. She brought with her many wedding gifts from her family, and among the gifts was a little statue given to her by her mother. Hundreds of years earlier, somewhere in the wild country of Southern Spain, a monk had made the statue from wood and wax. It was the image of a small boy who had spoken to the monk in a vision, urging him to pray. Following a time in prayer, the monk was inspired to fashion the likeness of the boy, and understood that his visionary visitor had been the child Jesus. The statue had come into the possession of a nun who gave it to the mother of the Spanish princess. When the princess’s own daughter was very old, she in turn gave the statue to a church in Prague. It was beloved and venerated, but when a foreign army took possession of Prague, the statue was damaged, discarded and buried in rubble behind the altar. Its hands had been broken off. And so it lay for years until it was discovered and was venerated again. It was at this point that it spoke out in a language the priest could understand saying, ‘Have pity on me and I will have pity on you. Give me my hands and I will give you peace. The more you honour me, the more I will bless you.’ And so it happened that the statue was completely restored, and has ever since stood in honour in the church of Our Lady of Victories in Prague where it is visited by people from all over the world, and is known as the Infant Jesus of Prague.

That’s the end of the story. Now I will speak to you in a more conversational tone.

The statue of the child Jesus is what might be called a trope which enters my fiction in a short story published in 1987. But before I discuss the significance of this image in the fiction, I must take some time to move the image from the fuzzy world of legend into what passes for reality.

There are points in the legend where time and place and person become specific, but the whole matter is so overlaid with mystery that I chose to frame it first in the vague language of the fairy tale. Rather than use terms such ‘a far country’, I considered that Spain and Bohemia were exotic enough to be tolerated in the context. However when it came to the fact about the Swedish army taking Prague, I decided to wipe them and just call them foreign. And all the characters, with the exception of the mysterious monk in wild southern Spain somewhere, do have names, the most celebrated of which is that of St Teresa of Avila who supposedly gave the statue to the mother of the original princess. It’s interesting to follow a few dates. The statue can be dated to the fourteenth century. That’s vague but useful. The princess married the prince in 1556. Teresa of Avila was born in 1515 and died in 1582. She was canonized in 1622. The statue was given to the church in 1628. The Swedish army occupied Prague in 1631. The statue was discovered, spoke, and was restored in 1637. Then in 1639 the Swedish army again swept into the city, but this time the people prayed for deliverance before the statue and the city was saved. The statue is now the focus of a world-wide devotion.

So, he is the Infant of Prague, enshrined in the church of Our Lady of Victories in Prague. He is 48 centimetres high, the size of a baby. He is dressed, according to the liturgical seasons, always in lavish royal robes from his vast and precious wardrobe. Very often reproductions of him are dressed in scarlet. In 2009 Pope Benedict gave him an ermine cape, and also a golden crown decorated with pearls and garnets. He has his own website, email, phone number and a shop where he sells a dizzying array of replicas of himself. His feast is in the third week of May. He is popularly associated with weddings and marriage, and in some parts of Ireland the bride puts a statue of him out of doors in a hedge in order to invoke good weather for her wedding day.

I’m not in the realm of high art or high literature here, but this statue is one kind of conduit to a spiritual realm. He is part of one level of the Catholic tradition of sacred objects, of pilgrimage, of prayer and veneration. The Christian may offer prayers to Christ, sometimes with an image in mind. Generally, I imagine, the idea is that the supplicant is invoking some kind of adult Christ. There are untold artistic representations of the adult Christ on which to focus. The picture in the Christian’s mind might be that of the Crucifixion. At some point in the life of some images, the image itself takes on a kind of life of its own and the prayers are felt to be mediated through the physical presence of the statue or painting. The statue itself can become something sacred. However, the question arises – does the sanctity of the object persevere if, for instance, the object is placed in an unsanctified context? If it is stolen, say, and sold as simply a work of art or folk art? Is the power independent of context? Sacred spaces can be ritually de-sanctified. Churches become houses or community centres. I am reminded of the chapel in Brideshead Revisited where, after it has been de-consecrated it is described as being ‘just an oddly decorated room.’

Often black statues of Mary reveal themselves in mysterious and miraculous ways, and are considered to be sacred as a result. Statues sometimes take on a physical life of their own and move themselves around from one location to another. The Infant of Prague has become a sacred object. Such objects are the subject of devotion, of what can only be called love. To the people who offer their prayers through or to them, they are beloved. Of themselves, they are beloved. It is as if the spirit of the sacred somehow dwells within them. I realise that some of the words I am now using have wandered off message – what do I mean by ‘the spirit of the sacred’? I don’t really know, but they were the only words to hand.

For my eighth birthday, in the spring of 1948, I received an imitation amber box, the size of a match box. It opened like a book, and inside was a little imitation amber rosary. An imitation silver charm of the Infant of Prague hung from the end of the chaplet, and the lid of the box, or the cover of the book, was imitation silver, impressed with a larger image of him. When I left my home in Tasmania in 1963, to live in Victoria, this box was stored in a suitcase containing other treasures, mostly small dolls, in the roof space of the garage. The whole suitcase has since disappeared, and although I have sometimes looked for an imitation amber rosary in an imitation silver and amber book, I have never seen another. It interests me that he went missing with the dolls, because if he resembles anything, it’s a doll. Statues of the Infant Jesus often resemble dolls. Charles Dickens, in his Pictures from Italy, described one such statue in Rome as ‘a little wooden doll, in face very like General Tom Thumb, the American dwarf.’ Once in the parlour of a convent in Spain I saw a nun dancing joyfully with a pudgy plaster Baby Jesus in her arms. I do have statues of the Infant of Prague, and a painting I once did of him, but perhaps more importantly he inhabits, one way or another, alongside the Black Madonna, certain strands of my fiction.

Now some of the deep preoccupations of my fiction are conception, pregnancy, babies, children. And lost children. Also art, as it happens, is a preoccupation of my fiction. These are obviously habits of my thinking and imagination. I am not saying they are unusual, just that they seem to be a natural element in my writing, currents that flow through the narratives. And they sometimes chime with the sacred imagery of Mary and Jesus. Conception and childbirth are of course central to the Christian story. The whole Bible can be seen to hinge on those few words in the Gospels about the conception and birth of Christ. ‘And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.’

There are other celebrated statues of the Infant Jesus in churches throughout the world, and although I have never visited the Infant of Prague, I saw, in 1974, the Bambinello in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. This was in fact the statue Charles Dickens described as resembling Tom Thumb. The Bambinello doesn’t have the fame of the Infant of Prague, but he is very important and beloved in Italy, particularly in Rome where he is taken out in a special car to visit the sick. He is also considered to be significant in money matters. If you climb on your knees the one hundred and twenty four steps of the marble staircase that leads up to the Church in Aracoeli, you might win the lottery. In 1994 I noticed a very small newspaper item saying that the Bambinello had been stolen. Not just art theft, but sacrilege. Here were two of my preoccupations coming together – the holy child’s statue and the lost child. The lost child statue. There is even a little personal echo in there – whatever became of the Infant of Prague in the suitcase with the dolls? The common sense answer to that one is that somebody gave the suitcase to a charity, and the Infant ended up in a shop and was sold for thirty pieces of copper.

It is twenty years since the Bambinello was stolen. It has never been recovered, and the statue that now stands in the church in Rome is a copy, also made from an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane. (I love the beginning of Pinocchio, the words being a subversion of fairy tales and of the idea of the making of a holy statue – once upon a time there was a piece of wood.) Anyway, the powers of the new Bambinello are the same as those of the original. This is an interesting concept – whichever way you happen to look at it. And the question arises: how about the powers of the stolen one?

International art theft is big business, but business requires a buyer. Who would buy the Bambinello, and why? He is decorated in jewels, but there must be easier ways to steal jewels. I asked myself this question, and because one way I answer questions is to write fiction, the result was a novel.

It was Ford Madox Ford who described the novel as ‘a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.’ I like that.

The Bambinello can not be classified as a work of great art, although he is a kind of work of art. Artifact I suppose. He is a fifteenth century statue sixty cm high, and his legend says that he was made in the Holy Land by a Franciscan. He was carved out of a piece of wood from the garden of Gethsemene, was painted by angels, and was baptized in the River Jordan. The boat bringing him to Rome was shipwrecked, but he floated ashore. He is a focus for devotion, and as such can I think be described as holy, or sacred. He exists within the sacred space of the Aracoeli, and is set apart from the everyday while being linked to the darker realities of life such as illness and money. Thieves violate the sacred space of the church, and further transgress by abducting the sacred object. They remove from the gaze of the worshippers the focus of their devotion, the statue that is the conduit of their hopes and prayers. 

My real interest here is not so much the arts in general, as the literary art. I write fiction – which is a matter of making up stories and writing them down. I made up a story about the theft of the Bambinello. That’s one thing. But it’s a big jump from thinking and writing about sacred objects to embracing the idea of ‘the sacred’.

Literature, suggest the notes about this conference, might make the sacred tangible. Or it might be a way of structuring the experience of the sacred. This may well be so. However I have to say that when I wrote the novel about the Bambinello, I was not conscious of setting out to do anything so grand.

‘The sacred’ in its abstract form must be the whole other realm of that which is set apart from all that is ‘unsacred’. I wonder if it is really possible to name a category ‘the sacred’ – or is it only possible to name objects or places as ‘being sacred’? How useful is the abstract noun when compared to the adjective? Is the literary art a gateway, a guide that can lead a person to enter the sacred? To perceive the sacred? Embrace the sacred? And does literary expression of aspects of the sacred bring the realm of the sacred into the realm of the unsacred? I hesitate to use the word ‘profane’ here because I think it might have too many misleading connotations. So ‘unsacred’ is now in my working vocabulary. I have never thought of it before. Literature can tell you where to look, how to look, what to do with the sacred when it confronts you. More elusive for me than the terms ‘arts’, ‘literature’ and ‘the sacred’, is the word ‘grounding’ in this context. I have chosen to interpret it for my purposes to mean ‘placing’ and ‘revealing’. Placing the sacred by means of making art or literature. As a client of art or literature, finding a way to know, to recognize what is sacred.

It’s still rather too grand for me.

As a fiction writer I don’t set out to invoke the sacred. I think that writing poetry usually has a whole different approach, and probably does often have as its aim an access to the numinous. But for a fiction writer what generally comes first is the excitement of telling stories, of making some sense of things by inventing narrative. Could that mean I am, when writing a story, sometimes trying to make sense of the sacred? Actually, I am inclined to think that it might not be possible to make sense of it. In the case of this novel, which is called Child of the Twilight, there was the inspiration from the news item about the theft of the statue – a news item which chimed with some of my preoccupations – statue of holy child, lost children, babies and pregnancy and conception (working backwards there). All this led to the construction of a fictional narrative, a story that touches on the sacred, but is in the first place more interested in the characters and the plot than in guiding readers towards the sacred. It is possible that by way of the plot and the characters, the novel addresses the question of the sanctity of human life. That’s possible.

When readers consider a novel they are in the luxurious position of being able to interpret it from several angles and in various ways. Things readers say, things critics say, things reviewers say, things academics say about a book are often something of a surprise to the writer. The writer is working from the inside out, while the reader is coming at it from the outside in. What I think I am doing isn’t necessarily the same as what a reader sees me doing. As a writer I reveal my moral position on matters whether I know it or not, and I reveal a great deal more than that. I think there is a lot of truth in the idea that readers find what they must in a text. Charlotte Bronte has the narrator of Vilette say: ‘To a feather-brained schoolgirl nothing is sacred.’ She could be right. There are readers and readers.

The title ‘Child of the Twilight’ was really meant to be ‘Child of the Twilight of Time’ but the publisher’s marketing department cut it back because it was too long. Now I come to think of it, that’s item number one in what is different in what I was doing and what the reader sees. The title on this book actually means nothing to me.

Child of the Twilight is narrated by a young American woman, a novelist born in 1988. She is named Sydney, after the Australian place where she was conceived. Her parents were both infertile, and Sydney was the result of genetic material from two unknown and undocumented sources. So although the woman she calls mother did give birth to her, by Assisted Reproductive Technology, known by its acronym as ART, she can never trace her own true history. (The same letters in a different order form the common acronym for Religious Art Theft.) The fact of her origins is central to Sydney’s own understanding of herself and of the world in general. Her family is wealthy, travelled, and pious, education of its girls being in Sacred Heart schools. This places them in the worldwide and very real family of girls who went to Sacred Heart convents. Sydney herself is a species of non-believer, considering all knowledge with a fairly cold eye. She describes herself as Sydney the Navigator, sometimes commenting on her own construction of the fiction the reader is reading. Her mother went to a Sacred Heart school in California with the mother of a young Franciscan from Tasmania. This priest, Roland the Good, was delivering a letter to the statue of the Bambinello on the night that the statue went missing. The search for the statue takes the story through several closely related narratives of conception and birth and death and loss, all with a focus on the sacred statue of the Bambinello. The true identity of the statue, the true identities of the characters – these are all questioned. Sydney sees herself as being outside ordinary reality because, in her conception, she lost the history of her own bloodlines, and is deeply interested in the bloodlines of her characters. Like the writers of the Old Testament she has a preoccupation with procreation. And don’t forget the famous found baby – Moses in the bulrushes. There’s a happy ending. Sydney says she takes a ‘biblical approach to character, whereby this one begat that one begat the other – until you get to the one who is really going to do the deeds and make the difference to things.’ Luke’s Gospel gives Mary’s bloodline; Matthew’s Gospel gives Joseph’s. But Sydney says: ‘The idea of bloodlines really appeals to me as a literary device partly because I am totally unbegotten, so that I personally lie outside the Bible, having no bloodline to speak of.’ She goes on to say that in the case of Jesus she can ‘follow the line that leads to Mary. But Mary is simply the Pure Vessel, isn’t she? The uterus. It’s not as if she supplied the Oocyte to the Godly Spermatozoon. As I understand it – and my understanding is possibly flawed here – the miraculous foetus arrived holus bolus, going from the Word to the Flesh in one clean movement. So while I don’t claim to be miraculous in the same way – although I am a modern miracle – I can see a parallel between myself and Jesus in that we are both outside the biblical theory of character.’

And so Sydney begins the story of the Bambinello and her other characters, most of whom have bloodlines, and so could be biblical, she says, were the Bible to be brought up to date.

It all starts like this:

‘Early on a wet February evening in 1994, Roland Bruccoli, a young Franciscan Father from Australia, arrived in Rome. Through the blurred windows of his cab he saw lights misted in greenish haloes around the street lamps as he drove through the dusk. It was Roland’s first visit to Italy, and for sentimental reasons he went swiftly to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli to pay a visit to the miraculous statue of the Infant Jesus, the Bambinello. His mother in Melbourne had asked him to do this. She believed that Roland’s birth in 1964 had been in answer to a request she made to the statue, and the idea of her son bearing a message to the Bambinello was sweet and deeply satisfying. Such hopes and prayers may be answered in unexpected ways, and the unexpected ways can be so very unexpected.

Things were, you see, more complicated than this pleasant little story sounds, for Roland had a twin, Eleena. When they were four years old, Eleena had run joyfully up a green embankment dotted with pink and white daisies. She ran onto the road and into the path of an oncoming car. This was during a neighbourhood cricket match, and Roland had been running behind his sister. Their father’s voice – Eleena, Roland, Eleena, stop, come back Eleena – died out, the sound of the word Eleena hanging on the air.

Everything stopped. The ball, the bat, the bowler, the conversation of the spectators, the laughter of children playing. Time. The daisies. The sun for a fragment of a second was arrested in the heavens, and one small cloud hung motionless just above the horizon. The car stopped. The young driver rushed forward, fell on her knees over the warm dead child. The air was cold, suddenly chill with disbelief. Cherry-red beads from Eleena’s broken necklace pattered across the road onto the sweet damp silent grass on the verge, bouncing into the gutter, rolling under and over little daisy faces.

I remember the story of Eleena’s death as my mother told it to me over the years. My mother has a catalogue of tales of babies and children lost and gone, one way and another. I think it is a habit of mind she has formed, a kind of accompaniment to her own infertility – children are so hard to come by, so fragile, so easily lost. Eleena was on our prayer list. An old-fashioned Catholic childhood can be a strangely morbid affair at times, with the communion of saints, meaning the company of the dead, forever hovering around, needing support, sometimes supporting in their turn.

Roland’s mother’s request regarding the message to the Bambinello in 1994 was clearly not a simple one, and was inevitably complicated by Eleena’s death all those years before. Roland, her envoy, her courier, had with him in the Roman church a small pink envelope in which there was a letter to the Bambinello. It was Roland’s task to place the envelope in one of the golden baskets provided, to send the message on its way. Heaven knows what was in the letter.

The church of the Aracoeli was empty. A few candles were still burning, conveying hopes and prayers to Heaven. It was almost time, said the Friar who met Roland at the door, to take the Bambinello into the safety of the monastery for the night. But something most strange had happened.

The Baby Boy was gone.

Roland blinked at the empty space where the golden thing should be, was not, and he felt a creeping, billowing fear. Around him an eerie atmosphere of anguish had opened up like some poisonous silver and black flower. Almost all the candles had died, their messages and prayers delivered in warm pinky yellow light to Heaven. The police came, at once, it seemed, in a breathless and vivid silence. But no traces of the thieves were found. They conducted short interviews, took notes, photographs, made diagrams, crossed themselves, looked at Roland with mulberry-black eyes and a quizzical air.

Not quite of suspicion, not quite of respect. What was an Australian doing here?’

The novel then traces the lives of the characters as they intersect with the Bambinello. Of course I won’t tell you the outcome. It ends with a letter from the narrator, Sydney, to you, the reader. She says that you may join in with the characters and pray for those who have died. (People have died in the course of the story.) She says you might be writing letters to the Bambinello yourself, asking for happy future outcomes for your own personal Assisted Reproductive Technology. She signs off with the words: ‘May your oocyte be sweetly receptive, may your spermatozoon joyfully go the distance. Only time will tell, she says, Only time will tell.’

Perhaps this narrative of the theft of the Bambinello may invite readers to contemplate some of the drama of the realm of the sacred. Only time will tell.