Blue Skies Read online

  BLUE

  SKIES

  PRAISE FOR BLUE SKIES

  ‘Enlivened by wit and a knack for the stunningly vivid turn of phrase…What makes Blue Skies a joy to read is the energy and colour of the writing, a meticulous—and very funny— gift for dialogue…a marvellous economy of words.’

  The Times

  ‘A remarkably original Australian writer…wickedly funny. Helen Hodgman has a sharp eye for detail and an even sharper ear for dialogue.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘The considerable strength of this book is in its precise yet undramatic style.’

  Spectator

  ‘A first novel by a writer to watch, a penetrating tragi-comedy.’

  Observer

  ‘The debut of a marvellously intractable writer.’

  Sunday Telegraph UK

  ‘Blacker-than-black humour…[a] gifted first novel.’

  Guardian

  ‘Entirely believable and deeply felt.’

  New York Times

  ‘Very good indeed…funny, quirky.’

  Glasgow Herald

  ‘Thoroughly entertaining.’

  Irish Times

  ‘A born writer with a style and an élan which are all her own.’

  Auberon Waugh

  ‘The vacuous expanses of placid, pointless marriage are well drawn…and the rising sense of crack-up firm but not over-emphatic.’

  Julian Barnes

  ‘A strange and memorable novel, rich in short circuits, cross currents, half themes. A potent voice, then and now.’

  Eva Hornung

  ‘Helen Hodgman’s sharp details of the everyday, infused as they are with weird hallucination, distil the very essence of Tasmanian gothic.’

  Carmel Bird

  ‘A memorable novel—sensuous, strange, prickly as a sea urchin.’

  Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Islands produce artists whose vision is idiosyncratic, perhaps even kinked: Helen Hodgman’s novel unsettlingly sums up the oddity and the bereft beauty of Tasmania back in the days before it filled up with boutique hotels and environmental activists. Gothic fiction usually requires bad weather, but Hodgman finds menace in the punishing glare of blue skies. Although the plot of her book suggests the early Ian McEwan and her hallucinatory style reminds me of David Lynch, these are affinities not influences: she is a genuine original. Like Virago before it, Text has rediscovered a small and scarily unforgettable classic.’

  Peter Conrad

  HELEN HODGMAN is the author of the novels Blue Skies (1976), Jack and Jill (1978; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Broken Words (1988; winner of the Christina Stead Prize), Passing Remarks (1996), Waiting for Matindi (1998) and The Bad Policeman (2001).

  DANIELLE WOOD is the author of The Alphabet of Light and Dark (2003; winner of the Australian/Vogel and Dobbie awards) and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls (2006). She teaches at the University of Tasmania.

  BLUE

  SKIES

  HELEN HODGMAN

  Introduction by Danielle Wood

  TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Helen Hodgman 2011

  Introduction copyright © Danielle Wood 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Gerald Duckworth & Co., London, 1976.

  Republished by Penguin Books, 1980.

  Republished (with Jack and Jill) by Virago Press, 1989.

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2011.

  Cover art and design by WH Chong

  Text design by Susan Miller

  Typeset in Centaur by J&M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Hodgman, Helen.

  Blue skies / Helen Hodgman.

  9781921758133 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  For Joan Woodberry

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Harsh Light of Day

  by Danielle Wood

  BLUE SKIES

  Reading Group notes available at

  textpublishing.com.au/resources/reading-group-guides

  INTRODUCTION

  The Harsh Light of Day

  When I was seventeen, my grandfather bought me a plane ticket to London. For him, London not only had the strategic advantage of being far from the boyfriend I had at the time: it was also the most obvious destination for the cultural enlivenment of a girl born and raised in Hobart. I arrived there in early winter and, though I loved the city for its theatres and museums and crazy-angled street-corner buildings, I was topographically adrift. The Thames was not so much a river as a concreted canal, and I missed my mountain. Worse, I felt myself pressed down upon by the heavy lid of sky that lightened later, darkened earlier and showed its blueness less often than even the very worst of the winter skies I’d lived beneath in Tasmania. I experienced several weeks of unbroken greyness before the clouds peeled away to reveal that, higher up, the sky was blue after all. Over-excited with relief, I took its photograph.

  Back in Hobart, I had my photographs developed. I expected to have a blue rectangle, a slice of pure cobalt to commemorate the day the sky cleared in London. But my picture turned out to be pale blue at best, and unmistakably shot through with greyish tendrils of cloud. Perhaps my eyes played tricks on me, or my cheap pocket camera was never up to the task of capturing that sky, that day. Or perhaps blue skies are not as uncomplicated as they first seem.

  Helen Hodgman made the same journey in reverse. She was thirteen-year-old Helen Willes when she emigrated with her parents from Essex to Tasmania in 1958, as part of the ‘Bring out a Briton’ campaign launched by the Australian government. It was like stepping from black and white to colour. She remembers the sensory onslaught of the light, the vivid palette of nature and a perception that she had arrived in a world of greater social freedoms.

  Social freedoms can be deceptive. Helen left Hobart High at fifteen and had a series of jobs, from a ‘disastrous’ stint at the Commonwealth Bank to waitressing, to working at a bookshop, where she finally started her education and met her future husband, Roger Hodgman. Their daughter, Meredith, was born in 1965. In 1969, Helen and a partner, Paul Schnieder, opened the Salamanca Place Gallery, the establishment that began the transformation of Hobart’s signature row of historic waterfront warehouses into a hub for the arts.

  In those years, in this place, Helen Hodgman was an observer twice removed. Not only was she from else where: she was a writer, though yet to write a word, and she turned this twin X-ray vision on her surroundings. What she saw was a landscape of beauty and mystery, and the cracking veneer of an insecure, insular society desperately trying to make nice in the aftermath of the violent dispossession wrought by colonisation.

  It took Helen’s return to England, when she moved to London in 1971, for these technicolour impressions to find their way onto the page. Blue Skies took shape during six intense months in 1975. The title and its understated irony came early, born of her experience that a blue sky can oppress just as certainly as can a grey one.

&nbs
p; It is common for Tasmanian literature to be soft-lit with the kinds of autumnal colours that are so flattering to sandstone convict ruins, a contrast to the red dust and white gums of much mainland Australian writing. Helen turns up the intensity, creating a glare under which she examines human desperation and ugliness. It is usual, in writing about Tasmania, for dawns and dusks to proliferate. Instead, Helen gives us broad daylight—precisely, a never-ending three o’clock. The unnamed heroine is, in this painfully deft portrait, suffering the crushing boredom and depression that can shadow the early days of motherhood. She is a curiously passive protagonist who is, as Helen describes it, ‘very good at slipping sideways’. Fleeing the demands of her new baby, and the emptiness of her home and marriage, this young mother ricochets between the embraces of various and equally revolting lovers, flouting the social conventions of ‘Tiny Town’, all the while pursued by angry ghosts in the landscape.

  The blue sky is a complex motif. Sometimes it is a perfect canvas in danger of being despoiled by the ‘passionate reds and purples and boiling yellow-green jealousies’ contained, just, within the abject human body. Other times it is a blazing firmament scorching the ‘vulnerable, white bodies’ that do not belong beneath it. In one startling pre-dawn scene the narrator even envisages the land as if from the sky itself, overseeing a tableau of the slaughter of Aborigines and seals, the fall of ‘crimson drops on the golden sand’.

  Blue Skies has many of the hallmarks of a first and youthful novel—confident and free-flowing imagery and dialogue, elements that appear to be semi-autobio.graphical, a risky ending. Like its narrator, the novel is sometimes abrasive and quirky, wilful and obsessive. But it had something that was immediately seen by editors at the venerable London publishing house Duckworth, that was also seen by contemporary critics and that will be seen by readers of this new edition: Blue Skies shines with raw, hard-edged talent. This book is— now, as it was when it first hit the shelves, in 1976—quite out of the ordinary.

  English perceptions of the novel from the time of its release are both amusing and smug. The original Duckworth edition’s blurb described Tasmania as a place ‘where the sky is always blue and nothing ever happens’, and I cannot help but smile at this, for I know how often it rains. London newspaper reviewers— nearly all positive—were almost too pleased to refer to Helen as a ‘chronicler of awful Australia’, to liken her command of the Australian idiom to that of Barry Humphries and the ‘vulgarity’ of one of her characters to that of Edna Everage.

  The Duckworth edition of Blue Skies splashed the word ‘incest’ on the jacket, without consultation with the author, and even though the text contains only a hint of an over-involved brother and sister. When Virago republished Blue Skies, in 1989—packaging it with Helen’s second novel, Jack and Jill—the new blurb continued to promise incest, along with the murder and suicide that the book does contain. Helen puts this down to the English being rather too interested in the notion of Tasmania as Australia’s incest capital.

  In the Hobart press, Blue Skies was warmly reviewed by the local literary matriarch Joan Woodberry, to whom the novel is dedicated, but other mentions of the book in the local daily, the Mercury, betray a dependable deference to the cultural standards of the Mother Country. ‘A novel about Tasmania has recently been highly praised by London’s hard to please literary critics,’ boasted the newspaper in 1977. Then, in 1979, when Helen won England’s prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for Jack and Jill, a Mercury headline made so bold as to claim her as a ‘Tasmanian author’, though she had left the state in 1971 and would never live here again.

  Home, for Helen Hodgman, has been Essex, Hobart, London, Vancouver and Sydney. Her concise debut, the product of two of those places, is a blister.ingly original contribution to Australian writing. Its bright colours undulled, Blue Skies remains a confronting snapshot of the social aridity of suburbia, the experience of marriage and motherhood, and life on the ‘heart-shaped island’ south of the mainland.

  Danielle Wood

  Hobart, December 2010

  At the bottom of Adventure Bay is a beautiful sandy beach… The other parts of the country adjoining the bay are quite hilly; and both those and the flat are an entire forest of very tall trees, rendered almost impassable by shrubs, brakes of fern, and fallen trees; except on the sides of some of the hills, where the trees are but thin, and a coarse grass is the interruption...In the afternoon, we were agreeably surprised, at the place where we were cutting wood, with a visit from some of the natives; eight men and a boy. They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, or rather with the greatest confidence imaginable.

  CAPTAIN COOK, WRITING OF HIS VISIT TO

  VAN DIEMEN ’S LAND , JANUARY 1777

  At the last ball at Government House, Hobart Town, there appeared the last male aboriginal inhabitant of Tasmania… As savages they were found, as savages they lived, and as savages they perished! Such an event is deserving of some notice.

  EXTRACT FROM THE SOCIAL NEWS,

  MERCURY, OCTOBER 1864

  I once had an aunt who went to Tasmania.

  NOËL COWARD, PRIVATE LIVES, 1930

  I’d watched it from the beginning.

  Before she came, our house had been the last in the road: a tatty full stop to a long line of prosperous weatherboard bungalows. It stood out a bit, as it wasn’t painted in a lurid pastel shade like the others—because I could never make up my mind what colour to do it. Dead colour-selection cards littered the house.

  On the far side was a small patch of scrubby bush straggling to the beach, the one remaining unsold block. For days on end I could forget that I lived in a suburb just by looking out of the right windows.

  Then the land was sold and cleared. Trenches were dug. Men built the house.

  The woman who had bought the block came each day to the site to oversee them. I eavesdropped behind my blinds as she whined at them to get on. The large sun-reddened men were unmoved. They took their time, pausing at regular intervals to brew billy tea, smoke and grin shyly at her through large mouthfuls of meat pie.

  The work was quickly finished, and the house balanced on an uneven area of raw reddish earth. The men left. It was a wet time and afterwards rainwater stood round it in slick, sky-reflecting puddles. The sun glinted and flashed on those pools, surrounding the house with a fence of reflected metallic shards.

  The woman hired another gang of large soft men, who levelled the earth and drained it. They dug it and primed it to receive the sackfuls of domesticated grass seeds.

  These the woman tended herself. A square of spiky grass blades stood before the house, a vivid and unreal green. Impressive at a distance, but close to it looked pretty sad. The blades were far apart. The dusty earth, growing dustier as summer passed, showed through the gaps like mange and defied her daily watering.

  The native grasses rustled and swayed at the edge of this pampered patch. Occasionally it would stake its aboriginal claim to the usurped homeland by launching a seed to fertilise and reclaim a centimetre. Tough though it was, it could not take the almost daily shaving.

  In those first few lawn-laying days the woman would be at the house early in the morning supervising the seeds. She seemed in no hurry to move in, as she waited for the grass to grow. I would pass her as I walked back from the beach, but she was too absorbed to speak, keeping herself to herself, which was good while it lasted. If she introduced herself, the beach spell would be broken. With luck and no interruptions, it would work for me all day. The beach was the main reason for my living there.

  I had found it during a weekend visit to my future in-laws. My pregnancy having been confirmed only twenty-four hours before, there was no hurry, I thought. But my husband liked to do things properly. The problem was to break the news and find somewhere to live.

  I had gone for an early morning walk to ponder these things and came upon the beach, over a slight rise in the road at a point where it looked to go on forever but merged at the bott
om of the slope into a stretch of cutting coarse seagrass, ending at the beach in a tangle of car tracks which petered out into the sand.

  Surprised early in the morning, it was a marvellous beach—a holiday-brochure cover of a beach. On each side it stretched away, pale yellow and perfect. Startling black rocks jutted up in contrast at either end, the sea bluest blue with silver-lamé glitters. It was an absurd extravagance of beauty so early in the day, a whirl of colours that I associated with midnight hours. I sat down in the dust among the empty beer cans and wept.

  I was stranded up on that beach like the poor dumb female turtle I once saw in a film. It had just laid a load of eggs in great distress and difficulty and hadn’t a hope of making it back to the sea, but, exhausted, was going to die.

  Walking back up the road I saw a house for sale.

  We borrowed money, bought it and moved in. My husband worked hard; he needed to repay the loan and prepare for his financial fatherhood. I sat back like the turtle and waited to die.

  It didn’t happen. The days passed and I began to doubt it would—numberless days when the clock always said three in the afternoon, no matter what you did to it. You could try turning it upside down. You could try catching it out, peeking suddenly round the door and taking it by surprise. No matter what you tried, the day ran out then, and there was nothing left to fill it with.

  All the other women in that nature reserve for females managed to invent something to fill their time in decorative and reassuring ways suggested by the women’s magazines—those placebos prescribed to sugar-coat time and keep half the population quiet and useful. But such schemes required spirit, an urge to fill days acceptably. I had none.

  The beach waited in its early morning perfection just for me and the odd dog-exerciser. When the sun rose higher, the pale yellow sand became an almost desert blaze. The black rocks crouched like primitive worship stones, antipodean Stonehenges.