The ballad of Frank and Hazel
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robert Hillman
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Early in the summer of 1978, I drove from St Kilda to my home town of Eildon in rural Victoria for the single purpose of saying hello to my father. I arrived in the early afternoon, gave my stepmother a kiss and walked out to the backyard. I knew I'd find Frank under the apple tree on the rickety banana lounge he'd rescued from the tip.
"Came up in that little bomb, did you?" he asked.
"The Mini? Yes."
He looked me over and attempted a smile – not a bad attempt, considering his despair. He reached down and picked up a copy of National Geographic from the lawn – the magazine that had succeeded Outdoors & Fishing and the Australasian Post as his preferred reading matter.
"Been there?" he said. The magazine was open at a picture essay on Madagascar: green mountains, fishermen, big lizards.
"No, not to Madagascar, Dad."
"Funny, I thought you did."
Tears were finding a path down the silver stubble on his cheeks. He wept easily in what turned out to be this final twelve months of his life. He wasn't ill, just unhappy.
We chatted for an hour or so about things he judged would be important to me – my three year-old son, my wife, the prospect of the Labor Party taking power in the next federal election. He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, never conceding that he was drying his tears and never doubting that I would be courteous enough not to mention them.
When it was time for me to leave, he said "Hope you didn't come all this way for me? You didn't, did you?"
"No, I had to see a man about a dog."
He smiled. "A man about a dog. Well, take care of yourself. Love to ... Pauline is it? Love to Pauline. And the little bloke."
"Harry."
"Yeah, Harry."
Almost a clean getaway. The sentimentality that lately had taken a violent hold on my father had been kept in check. But he called me back.
"Bobby ..."
"Yep?"
I could see the blow coming.
"Do what you do do well, son," he said, quoting the lines of a Ned Miller song of some years back. "Do what you do do well."
"Yep," I said, and hurried away.
IN THE CAR ON THE WAY BACK TO ST KILDA, I HISSED AT MYSELF for not having a big enough heart to respond more generously to my father's offering. What did I want from him? A pithy verse from Sheridan on the subject of parting? A page of Proust? For the remainder of the journey home and for a week afterwards, I carried on a neurotic interior monologue, all but accusing my father of sentimental abuse, then later accusing myself of disloyalty to a man who had struggled bravely to love me all his life. I went penitently to my home town a month later and left in the same state of distress. It wasn't Ned Miller who did the damage on this trip, but Slim Dusty.
My father died on a Saturday afternoon in the toilets of the Golden Trout Hotel, the only pub in my home town. He'd been feeling crook, according to friends who'd been drinking with him that day, and had hurried off to the toilet to vomit. He died in a cubicle, striking his head on the toilet bowl. The mark on his forehead left by the blow was clearly visible when I saw his body in the morgue.
My sister cried her heart out at the funeral. Her grief was so intense that she fainted when the coffin started its descent into the grave. My eyes remained dry, but I sorrowed. My stepmother dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex, leaned her head against my shoulder and whispered; "Oh God, Bobby, in a toilet, a toilet!"
Kind things were said about my father at his funeral; the same kind things that are said of everyone at the end. I was listening but I was also thinking of Ned Miller's song and of the way in which the line Frank had offered me a year earlier endorsed the hodgepodge of beliefs that he hoped he upheld. The story told in the song is of a wise and beloved father of a type found here and there in the real world, no doubt, but my own father was far more interesting.
He was an industrious philanderer for most of his life, a cheerful boozer, a man of large loyalties certainly – at least in the male domain – but also of unrestrained malice when he thought he'd been wronged. Although he bore no resemblance to the dad in the song, if he could have chosen the figure he most wished to be mistaken for, it would have been Ned Miller's folksy pop.
Well and good. We're allowed to fantasise. What had upset me about Frank's offering was that he'd spoken the lines without irony, without any acknowledgement of their silliness. It was unlike him. He was a fine satirist, usually happy to lampoon himself. Some power, some knack he'd always been able to rely on had abandoned him. What I'd thought of as embarrassment on that afternoon in 1978 was actually grief.