Eulogy
Vale Chester Eagle 1933 – 2021
On this page, we present the shared thoughts and memories of Chester’s dear friends and colleagues, who were unable to attend a formal memorial event due to the Covid lockdowns in 2021. As these eulogies show, the influence of Chester’s life and work was wide-ranging and diverse. As a teacher, he encouraged and inspired. As a colleague, he mobilised those around him to bring about change. As a friend, he listened, supported, empathised, and advised. As a mentor, he unselfishly helped other artists (writers, singers, painters, photographers) to find their voice. As a writer, he stuck to his task and brought to pasture a prodigious body of work, which he offered gratis to the world.
Although my interactions with Chester were in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the memories remain. In 1958 I enrolled at the Bairnsdale Technical School, somewhat apprehensive as to what awaited me. The name ‘Chester Eagle’ was a little daunting, from what previous students said. I found the man himself to be devoted to the teaching of English, even fanatical to the point where pupils who didn’t concentrate were quickly brought into line. He had a temper that saw him go bright red in the face and almost bite his tongue as he admonished the errant pupil by poking them in the chest with a finger seemingly made of iron. However, being an avid reader from my primary school days, he struck a chord with me and I couldn’t wait for his lessons, all of which showed a great variety of approaches.
I became hooked on the written language and couldn’t get enough. A love of the language was formed by the fervour that Chester demonstrated. At the end of form 4, I was offered a position as a cadet reporter for the local newspaper but decided to continue at the local High School until the end of Matriculation, which enabled me to become a primary school teacher. Throughout my teaching career, I attempted to pass on the love of language to my pupils. When I had an exceptionally gifted pupil, I contacted Chester for suggestions as to how I could advance this gift. His advice was spot on. Years later he sent me some of his short stories, which I read avidly. He also wrote some plays to be performed by the students and had an outdoor stage erected for this purpose. I did have a role in one of these plays and will never forget the efforts of Chester to mould a group of ratbags into polished performers. To sum up, Chester was the single reason my love of the English language remains to this day and hopefully, I have passed this on to the hundreds of children I have taught over the years since 1967.
Vale Chester Eagle, a man in a million.
The year 1998 saw the start of our lifelong friendship. Chester Eagle was paying his first visit to China and the Oceanian Studies Center of Anhui University. At the welcome dinner, he was introduced as the author of Mapping the Paddock which I did not quite understand then but was strangely intrigued. Inspired by his lively stories, I desired to see the southern continent with my own eyes one day and have a look at the paddocks that Chester loved ardently in his book. For the first time, Australia came into my life for real.
In the following correspondences, Chester offered me numerous help to facilitate my path through postgraduate studies. He fully understood the difficulties I ran into in doing my postgraduate thesis on Peter Carey’s short fictions and voluntarily sent me any critical papers and reading materials he could lay his hands on. And this habit he kept for many, many years even when I grew into a more mature scholar. He was not only concerned about my academic development, but also eager to show me what a real Australia is in terms of history, landscape and societal life. My first visit to Australia in 2005, therefore, was a happy surprise to him and we met again in Melbourne. He invited me and another Chinese visiting scholar to stay at his house for free and drove us around in his minicar. It was such a brief but memorable time that I was hugely stimulated to explore further the Australian literary world. With constant inspiration from Chester, I succeeded in reaping a CSC scholarship in 2011, which allowed me to spend one full year at La Trobe University as a visiting scholar. Chester was thrilled by the good news of my second visit and planned a number of trips for us to take together. One of the most unforgettable excursions was to visit the Paddocks in which Chester spent his childhood. We arrived at Finley after a long drive and had a close look at the primary school where he was educated and even the river he once swam in. How lovely it was to walk into the childhood life of my dearest friend and to share his memories! More fascinatingly, Chester recorded this journey experience in one of his mini mags and my name was referred to for the first time.
Aside from organising the field explorations, Chester was more than pleased to introduce me to his prestigious writer friends including Alice Pung, Alexis Wright, Steven Carroll and his wife Fiona Capp and others, who were all amiable, hospitable and amazingly kind-hearted to help with my discovery of Australia. What touched me, in particular, is that he took me along to meet his son Aston and fly up to Cairns to visit his daughter Miriam and her family. At some moments, I had an illusion that I was treated not only as a dear friend but also as part of his family. What a pleasure and honour it was! With Chester’s unwavering support and back-up, I spent a fruitful and fulfilling year at La Trobe and never felt lonely for being far away from my people and place. His generosity and beneficence will always be remembered as an uplifting force to cheer me up in my journey of life. He was not only a true friend worthy of trust, love and respect but also a laudable patriot who harboured a strong passion for his motherland that drove him to convey every goodwill and kindness to people from afar. I feel so fortunate to have been a close friend with Chester and feel blessed to be bathed in the brilliance of his noble character. May he rest in peace!
It’s a long way from the flat, black-soil plains of southern New South Wales to the prestigious halls, classrooms and playing fields of Melbourne Grammar. However, you adapted easily to the school’s values of loyalty, hard work, the pursuit of excellence and the presumption that noblesse oblige carried some social responsibility. Your respect for these cultural norms did not, however, entail blind subservience. In later years, your Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty (McPhee Gribble, 1986), would effectively skewer parts of the process that sought to turn boys into ‘a certain class of men’ (see also the mini-mag of that title). Your intelligent critique was so on the money that the Principal politely declined your offer of a re-print for the school’s sesquicentenary!
In adolescence, you became intoxicated with language, through reading the King James Bible, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the plays of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. Writing was to become a lifelong passion that would bring to pasture seventy publications (count them!), which you offered the world gratis on your website, Trojan Press.
It’s a long way from the flat, black-soil plains around Finley to the mountains of the Great Dividing Range north of Bairnsdale, where you began your teaching career and worked hard to understand the local, hard-drinking culture. The mountains became your new obsession and they appear constantly in your writing. Your first book Hail and Farewell! An evocation of Gippsland (1970) and its re-issue House of Trees (1987) bring to life people, places, stories and legends in a setting you eventually came to love. From what you regarded as your masterpiece, Wainwrights’ Mountain (1997) to The Pilgrims (2013), to the mini-mags At Baldy’s feet (2008), Castle Hill (2011) and There’s His Majesty! (2016), the high country of East Gippsland is a pervasive presence. Mt Baldhead, the Pinnacles, the Crosscut Saw, Mount Tamboritha, Trapyard Hill, Mount Blowhard… these mountains challenged you with their silence, their alien indifference, their very such-ness. ‘They watched us arrive and they will watch us leave’, wrote Robert McFarlane in Mountains of the Mind (2008), one of your favourite books. As your crazy prophet Giles Wainwright puts it:
Searching for the source of my river, I found the mountain. From the top, the world was spread around me. I had been blessed, or cursed, with an immoderate pride: the mountain had a lordliness more than equal to mine, and the advantage, in age, of a million years.
The Great Dividing Range also became, for you, a place where stories may be discovered. Or invented. You describe the genesis of your mini-mag Escape (2004) as follows.
I was staying at a house in the mountains of East Gippsland, and my hosts took me to a hut a few kilometres away. Like the hut in my story, it was off the edge of high country, sitting on a ledge no larger than a suburban block. Words had been painted and/or charcoaled on the outside and there was more writing within. There was a pipe to bring water, a copper to heat it, and a bath for whomsoever felt inclined. […]
What had happened here? That was for me to imagine. I think it is fairly rare for a writer to know that he is walking on the ground where a story will happen—as soon as he imagines it—and within the psychic space of a story. Stories are like incarnations, to writers, and I knew, that morning, that I was peculiarly blessed. I knew! The next day I drove back to Melbourne, and the day after, I started to write. […]
‘Real’ life and the imagination dance around each other, each accusing the other of excess! What happens in my story almost certainly didn’t happen, but it could have, in the curious and satisfying world which the imagination brings into being.
Escape was translated into Mandarin and published in the Australian issue of ‘World Literature’ (Beijing 2012). It attracted a crowd of enthusiastic Chinese readers, who immediately understood the connection you made between mountains and humanity’s age-old quest for wisdom. You laughed out loud, I remember, at a catty comment, probably motivated by envy, that the story must have gained something in translation when the Chinese read it! But then, you never took your critics seriously.
Can we distil the quintessence of your work by focussing on such a very small part of it? Please allow me to try.
Marlene has come to the mountains, not to be wise (she sees this as beyond her capability) but to ‘be where wisdom is.’ Harold offers her a hut on his property, high up on a ledge.
‘The place I’m offering you has the potential to let you find everything or anything you want. That’s the good prospect: the bad is that you’ll go mad with misery, yearning and human need.’
‘That,’ she said, ‘will never happen. Show me this place. And when we get there you must be honest enough to tell me why you’re giving it to me.’
Dear Chester, your female characters are often a step or two ahead of their male counterparts, who have much to learn from women, if only they (we!) would listen (see for example Carol, in At the window, 1984). Marlene is no starry-eyed hippie. She works with Harold to fix up the hut, to set up a pipe of spring water and to install a metal bath in the open air, on the ledge.
‘I ought to thank you, and I do, but you’re doing this for yourself. This’ she said, ‘ is the place where you want to live, and I’m to do it for you. Come when you can, and I’ll report.’
Harold regularly delivers supplies and they talk together amicably, but without establishing any intimacy. After a few weeks, Marlene makes a decision.
Sitting inside on a chilly day, she said, ‘Light the fire under the copper. It’s time to share truth with each other.’
They fill the copper from the spring and light a fire to heat the water they will need for their bath together.
‘You’re afraid,’ she says to Harold.
‘I am a little. It’s taken me by surprise.’
‘Courage is another name for foolishness. Fear’s in the brain, sensing when something it doesn’t understand is close’.
‘True. But what’s coming to make me afraid? If a lion had me by the leg, or a rhino was charging, I’d have a reason. But…’ He waved his hand at the world outside, the trees, the sky quiet. She said, ‘It’s knowledge about ourselves we fear. We want to stay as we are. A realisation is a change. To know something new is to become something different.’
‘I think you’ve put your finger on it. What is it that I want to know?’
‘You’ll tell yourself, and I’ll listen.’ Her eyes turned momentarily to the bath, in a clump of snow gums.
They throw leaves and sticks under the metal bath and as the fire springs up, something wild takes over in them. They strip away their clothing and step into the bath together. ‘Be ready, wisdom!’ Marlene calls, ‘We’re not far away!’
Not far away… but will they arrive? My dear Chester, this is one of your great scenes and brings together the elemental forces of earth, air, fire and water. This is not an encounter between two beings that long to merge, but between two beings seeking, and failing to find, separate paths to transcendence.
There are two more bath scenes in the story. Harold has begun to look back on his life and identify his illusions about becoming ‘a proper man’. He realises that he does not want a companion, let alone a soothing wife, but ‘someone whose restlessness is as great as my own’. Marlene has however chosen a path that precludes companionship or even some affiliation with her fellow human beings.
Speaking over his shoulder, addressing, he felt, the rocks on the mountainside, she intoned. ‘Continuing the human species involves declaring your membership. I left it years ago.’ She added, whimsically, ‘Resigned. Let my papers lapse. Stopped paying my dues. I put myself into the silence to see what I could hear.’
They listened. The very presence of the mountains is a song. Orchestral air murmured about them, and a wind, high above, moved clouds to let a beam of light brighten the other side of their valley. He wanted to ask her questions, but knew it would break an unspoken rule.
When Harold eventually blurts out that he wants to look after her, protect her, and maybe get drunk with her, so they could roll and giggle together on the grass, he knows immediately that he has driven her away.
‘In giving me perfection, you create imperfection. If everything’s provided, I’ve got too much. Given what I need, I’m imprisoned. The solitary path is a painful one, and has to be. The trap of perfection is what everyone says it is—a gilded cage. I’m moving on.’
And so Harold later returns to the hut, to find it abandoned. The possums have been in. He finds Marlene’s books, with no name on the fly-leaf, crumpled scraps of paper and on the walls and ceiling fragments written in charcoal, pencil or chalk, open to the world and at the mercy of the next bushfire. One sentence offers the quasi-certainty of a maxim: ‘Those that say we die alone, forget that we live alone.’
Marlene has gone and Harold, like all of Chester’s many friends, must come to terms with the pain of loss, as I write about Chester henceforth in the third person singular. You see, Chester did so much more than scribble fragments on the walls and ceiling of his hut; and no bushfire can ever obliterate his works, which live on his website, free to all comers. Chester was also subject to the temptations of transcendence (witness his abiding love of music!), but he had the courage to recognise that to be human is to come with limitations. So he continued to batter at the cage of language and hone the instruments of his craft. He has left us an enormous legacy of novels, essays, mini-mags and librettos: food for thought, flashes of wisdom, striking metaphors, splendid images; and stories with heart.
Many of us have fond recollections of conversations with Chester, fuelled by good red wine and covering a gamut of fields: music and opera, literature, politics, the history of Australian painting, the continuing dispossession and neglect of Indigenous Australians, the deviousness of some publishers; and character analyses of people in power, especially when their stories were false and their slogans patently dishonest. For all his humane concern, Chester never learned to suffer fools gladly. He loved to talk, but he was also a good listener, respectful of others’ views, non-judgemental, empathetic. He listened to those, like me, who offered critical comments on this or that piece of his work; and he would sometimes acknowledge a quibble, but he would not be ‘edited’—by anyone!
These conversations are behind us now. We can no longer talk to Chester; but be consoled, people, Chester can still talk to us!
Hail and farewell, my good friend.
My first encounter with Chester was as a year 9C student at an all-boys technical school in Preston (circa 1969). The school was a breeding ground for factory fodder in the growing industrial hub of the North. Chester waltzed into the rowdy class of boys, hanging from rafters, pushing and shoving each other for no other reason than to release pent up aggression. This cravat-wearing collared gentleman was the new English teacher and we (year 9 boys) were bemused by his attire. He looked so ‘out of place’ we were more accustomed to angry old men in ill-fitting suits.
Chester’s approach to learning soon captivated many of us, not all of course, but many. I remember well the day he bought in a record player and loosed Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence on us, along with Bob and Joan. We were enthralled that English could have something to do with music. As a teacher, Chester took risks, which was admirable and a lesson I carried with me into my own profession.
It was in my latter years when Chester reappeared as my Year 11 English teacher. As was his want for ‘risk-taking’ he convinced us that Carlton was where we should journey. An ‘excursion’ was proposed, and Chester organised a ‘cultural’ tour of Carlton, the University, and a ‘hippy’ watch sideshow. Chester loved taking photos and sharing them; he loved the architecture of Carlton, and beseeched us to examine the beauty of ‘bricks and mortar’. All this loving of ‘art and architecture’ was at times lost on us. What Chester didn’t know, or perhaps did by making no reference to it, was that our version of a ‘Kultural’ tour of Carlton was to drink in the many Pubs along the way. I remember our first watering hole was the Nicholson Inn; we were only thrown out when someone wore their ‘school uniform’. It was a blurry beginning to the Kulture of Carlton.Chester persisted, as was his wont. He took us to a matinee performance at the Pram Factory: Jack Hibberd’s. This time he was accompanied by his wife, which absolutely shocked us all: Chester married to such a beautiful young woman—a stretch of imagination it was. Chester’s openness to share his ‘life experiences’ and reveal an ‘otherness’ to Australian life remains my lasting memory of Chester as my Tech School English teacher.
Chester reappears in my life, as my Head of Department of Humanities at NMIT. My first day on the job, Chester commented: ‘Ahhhh, the boy from Preston has returned’. Here I was all prepared for teaching, dressed in shorts and thongs, hair and beard past my shoulders and carrying my crib in a Gladstone bag. Chester was making a point as my HoD: things had to change.
Whilst Chester was the ‘de jure’ HoD, he was busy writing one of his many books in the room ‘upstairs’ leaving the ‘de facto’ HoD role to Kevin. This ‘split’ of the HoD role was articulated succinctly in one of our many ‘democratically run’ Humanities Department meetings when Chester was confronted by the question; how do you do a half a head-job? The meeting descended into hysteria and was quickly adjourned.
Chester’s love of coffee annoyed the ‘instant’ and ‘quick fix’ coffee users. Chester loitered around the staff ‘urn’ preparing his ‘drip filter system, folding his paper filters carefully into his cup, manually grinding his beans, while the ‘quick fixers’ waited impatiently for this slow and tedious cycle to finish. Of course, we know now that Chester was onto something, bringing the Lygon Street coffee culture into the staffroom, well ahead of time.
I heard many stories from Chester’s students of his engaging Australian Society course in the TOP program. Students would gather comfortably upstairs and listen attentively to Chester’s eloquent interpretations and explanations of Australiana. A journey he had taken me, and many others on, years earlier.
It was only recently, Chester revealed to me that whilst his body might be frail, his mind was still working, so he was prepared to read and advise on a book I was editing. He gave freely of his time and thoughts and helped me a great deal during this process, reminding me at one stage to include him a lot earlier in this writing process. This was Chester’s way of indicating that writing and editing were not in my toolkit (Gladstone Bag). My recollections are that Chester’s contributions pervade most of my professional life and I am deeply honoured and indebted to him for providing tolerance and acceptance, teaching uniqueness, and sharing his love of words with us all.
So how do we speak of Chester Arthur Eagle, our friend for over 50 years? Cultivated, learned, experienced and widely-travelled; intelligent, perceptive, with a sharp, active mind; sensitive and caring; a man who loved the bush and Australia while remaining well aware and condemnatory of our shortcomings and failures; someone who looked and listened and thought about what he saw and heard; a warm and generous friend. Chester was all these things. He was also an extraordinarily talented and creative man.
I first met Chester in 1967 when I started my teaching career at Bairnsdale Tech. He was my Senior Master and you’d have been hard-pressed to have found a better one. He was welcoming, friendly, supportive and so on, and most importantly, there was no bulldust. It wasn’t long before I realised that he was something of a legend at the school too with his thirteen-year tenure, tales of his Ned Kelly play, and his great knowledge of and love for East Gippsland. We quickly became friends, and the friendship lasted.
Chester’s love of the bush and the area helped develop mine. Pauline and I went with him on several walks and trips in that beautiful country. He introduced us to the country around Dargo, to Bentley’s Plain and his beloved Castle Hill. He told stories of the people and places. He fanned our enthusiasm and delight, helped open our eyes to special things. It was with him and others for example that we had the privilege of seeing a magnificent virgin Alpine Ash forest, a great open orchard of giant trees, scattered wattles and flashing Crimson Rosellas. Wonderful country and for us just in time – when we returned some years later it had been clear-felled.
Ches left Bairnsdale in 1968. Pauline and I, now married, spent another year there, continuing to explore and extend our knowledge of the trees, birds and places. We too loved the area and looking back we are well aware now how our natural interests had been kindled and enriched by Chester’s enthusiasm and love for the place.
Our friendship continued. When we returned to Melbourne we visited each other; later, when Pauline and I left Victoria and went travelling, we corresponded. Chester always seemed interested in what we were doing, indicative I think not just of his fondness for us but also of that active, enquiring mind, that interest in life and living, that never left him.
When we finally settled in WA our contacts were mainly over the phone. We’d have lunch together or share a bottle or two of red when we visited Melbourne – I’d try to get him onto some of our good WA wines but although he’d be polite it was always clear that D’Arenberg was what he really wanted. At Ivanhoe more recently we’d sit inside, settling the world’s problems, but earlier on and sometimes later we’d be outside in his over-grown back garden where Ches had worked to create his little piece of bush, of Gippsland. Pauline loved it there.
Over the years Chester came across to stay with us a few times. He was great company and interested in everything. A trip to New Norcia amazed him and led to an opera. Another to the south-west was shaped around him getting to see Cape Mentelle, the place rather than the winery. He’d heard of it and wanted to see it. He wanted to know. Once he told me how he wanted to visit Meekatharra. I laughed and explained nobody wanted to visit Meekatharra but that we’d take him. We did, going up the back way through Yalgoo and having a good look at some of the Murchison. We shared our old Jayco van and were away a while, enjoying it. When we finally reached Meeka he understood what I had meant but he’d had to see and he enjoyed the getting there.
Of course all Chester’s travel was done in his dark suit and cravat despite the fact it was pretty warm and dusty. In the bar at Yalgoo his dress excited some attention with a few blokes querying who had died, what church he was from and so on. It’s the only time I remember Ches getting a bit touchy. I tried not to laugh. I never did understand why he dressed as he did. He once said something about maintaining standards but I just let it pass. He was Chester.
And through all this time there was his tremendous creativity. I believe Chester’s opus is remarkable in number and variety, and it seems his creative energy was endless, or very nearly so. His novels, essays, mini-mags, memoirs and operas cover great scope and show great vision. His ability to handle a “cast of thousands” in some of his books always amazed me. He was rightly proud of his talent and worked hard and he was writing to the end. Grassy Hill, his last novel, is one of his best I think, wide-ranging and successfully tracking so many lives.
Chester was very generous with his work. Having Trojan Press freely available on-line was generosity, I believe, not self-aggrandisement. His earlier Literary Grants and commercially published works, and the esteem in which his writing seems to be held in China, vouch for his ability to succeed in the standard literary world of publishing but he wanted his work to be more easily available. He wanted to share and to let others taste his thoughts free of charge so he put them out there. Good on him.
And of course, he was similarly generous as a friend. It wasn’t just sharing ideas in longish phone conversations. Over the years we regularly received packages from him – a painting he knew we’d like, newly published books or bundles of Mini Mags. We treasure them.
So now Ches, you’ve gone, but you’re still with us. All the above remains. It was our pleasure and our privilege to have known you, dear friend. Farewell.
Remembering “Squadron Leader” Chester Eagle
I met Chester through our mutual friend, the Melbourne book designer and cartoonist Vane Lindesay. I can’t recall now how that first meeting evolved into our friendship. Anyway, it did. But who wouldn’t wish to be chums with someone called ‘CHESTER EAGLE’? It’s a name straight out of Biggles! Over the years we kept in touch directly, over the phone, through the post, and via email. I was always delighted when the postman delivered a packet of Chester’s latest ‘Mini-Mags’. They were just the right size and length to read on a tram—or the toilet! Chester was a relentless writer. He always had something in the works. I think that’s what inspired me the most. His energy. My tribute to Chester consists of brief snatches from some of our exchanges—the sort of things I now miss.
A long-time interest of mine is popular culture and its influence on everyday architecture. For many years I taught Popular Architecture and Design in the Architecture Department at the University of Melbourne, and one of the books on this course’s reading list was Chester’s quirky ‘biography’ of Melbourne, Melba: An Australian City. From time to time I’d send him things I’d written, including, apparently, a copy of my book Mail Art: The DIY Letterbox from Workshop to Gatepost, which prompted the following email from him:
I don’t think I mentioned that until very recently I was spending a lot of time with a very dear Chinese friend of mine called Zhan Chunjuan, from Anhui University in the city of Hefei. Her government gave her money to spend a year in Australia reading our contemporary literature. She was based at Latrobe University and lived a little to the north of me. I took every chance I could to show her parts of Australia she’d otherwise never get to know. I gave her the copy you sent me of your book on vernacular letter-boxes and their relationship with ‘their’ houses. She found this very amusing and it wasn’t long before she was noticing Ned Kelly (and other quaint) letterboxes here and there and taking photos of them. This was a source of enormous amusement to the two of us and I think you could fairly and justly be invited to put a white cockatoo feather in your cap for having got this silliness underway!
One time over a glass of red at 23 Langs Road, Chester told me how his Trojan Press came to be. He was very proud of whatever novel he had just finished, which he considered as ‘One of my very best.’ So, he sent it off to QUP with every expectation of success since they had already published him. After five months had gone by without hearing a word from them, Chester called them to ask for his manuscript back. Mr X, the editor who had been given his novel to review, was away, so he spoke to his very obliging secretary, Miss Y. She couldn’t recall seeing Chester’s manuscript, but she promised to look for it in Mr X’s office. ‘Could you call me back tomorrow?’ she asked him. So, the next day Chester called again. ‘Good news!’ Miss Y said. ‘I’ve found your manuscript,’ adding with a degree of honesty that absolutely floored him, ‘it was propping up Mr X’s computer.’ Good news? Good grief! Chester doubted whether Mr X had even looked at the manuscript—beyond noticing its convenient bulk, that is. That was the finish of commercial publishers as far as Chester was concerned, and the Trojan Press was born. ‘I like working with friends and I don’t like dealing with commercial people who are trying to make a living out of other people’s arts,’ Chester told me later. ‘It means I’m practically unknown, but it keeps me in the sorts of moods that I prefer and doesn’t expose me to the stupidities I see around me all the time.’ Hear, hear, Chester!
When my first grandchild, Loom Clarity Groves, was born in 2014, I emailed Chester to tell him the good news, along with a couple of photos of her taken in the maternity ward. Seven years and almost two more grandchildren later, I find his words of wisdom even truer now: ‘It’s always a shock to the system (anybody’s) to realise that life has taken another step and that there is now in the world a new centre of attention. I think it took me a few years to realise that my daughter’s boys had moved me into the past. You’ll notice it the first time you hear yourself referred to as “grandpa”!’ However, there was something about the two photos of Loom that troubled Chester. ‘The child in the lower picture has an identity tag on the right wrist, and the names don’t agree,’ he told me, clearly concerned. ‘Is everything okay? Please check and let me know. All best wishes, and congratulations to all involved.’ Somewhat alarmed, I checked the two photos of baby Loom. ‘That’s the mother’s/my daughter-in-law’s name!’ I told Chester, relieved.
Chester and I shared an interest in George Johnston, the Australian author of My Brother Jack. My interest is very narrow, though—the five Professor Ronald Challis detective novels that Johnston wrote using the pseudonym, ‘Shane Martin’, made up from the first names of his two oldest children, daughter Shane and son Martin, with his second wife, the writer Charmian Clift. In 1980, Chester had the brilliant idea of interviewing George’s real brother Jack and sister-in-law Pat, whom he’d fictionalised in his novel, at their house, 4 Peace Court, Doveton. In the end, Chester admired the ‘unknown Johnstons’ far more than the ‘famous Johnstons’. ‘I had two of the best nights of my life with Jack and Pat, two of nature’s gents,’ he told me. Later Chester also helped to ‘tidy up’ the manuscript of a book by his late friend, Max Brown, titled Charmian and George: The Marriage of George Johnston and Charmian Clift, which was published posthumously. In 2018, I took some long service leave and visited Greece for three months with my wife. One of my reasons for going was to visit Kalymnos and Hydra, the two idyllic Greek islands where George, Charmian, and their three kids lived between 1954 and 1964. I emailed Chester from Greece. I was on Professor Challis’s trail! I wondered whether the title of his novel, Victoria Challis, was a ‘nod’ to George Johnston’s detective? It wasn’t—but that’s another story! However, here is part of Chester’s reply:
In Greece? I dub you a master of the unexpected. Still, long service leave demands of us that we get out of our usual patterns. […] I wasn’t aware that George had invented a Professor Challis. What a researcher you are! I’m sorry I’m only emailing you when we could be sitting on the harbour-side of an island in the Mediterranean, chatting away and putting all our booze on the bill, to be paid one day when a cheque falls down from heaven! […] It’s funny that you wanted to mention George Johnston. Because of my teaching work, years ago, and then my researches, I feel connected to him, even though he’s not a man that I would have liked. In many ways I feel sorry for him because although he had talent to spare, he had to struggle desperately to become the writer that he wanted to be. I think he suffered terribly when he was writing the books for which he’s now famous and even more terribly when he wasn’t writing them because he didn’t know what he needed to write. I think he and Charmian were terribly bad for each other even though there’s no question that they were bonded more deeply than either of them could manage. I think that the dream that they set off in search of turned into a nightmare and neither of them could find a way to avoid what was happening. It’s all too sad to think about. Lots of love, Derham, and all good wishes. Thanks for writing from Greece! Stay in touch and when you return to Melbourne, let’s share a bottle of red. Supplies are holding well at my end.
Thanks very much, Chester! As my old Dad used to say, ‘I’ll see you in the soup.’
Today, we attended Chester’s moving memorial ceremony in Eaglemont. A beautiful celebration of his long and creative life. Which included excellent descriptions of inspired teaching. The integrity and energy he employed to understand and support students and fellow teachers through a complicated evolving education system. He also supported artists with genuine appreciation and selective purchases. My father George W. Bell was not a hugely successful artist but his paintings adorned many of Chester’s walls. He supported George whenever a subject was researched. They shared ideas about the art world and the selective historical representation of iconic figures such as Ned Kelly, William Buckley, and Donald Bradman. I have used many of Chester’s words to describe my father’s attitude to success and although painfully slow his advice about writing a biography has been terrific.
In 1958/59, my first two years of Secondary Education at Bairnsdale Tech, Chester taught English and Social Studies. His lessons and themes were original, topical, and designed to appeal to a bunch of boys who were mostly just filling in time before they could leave school to become farmers, motor mechanics, mill workers, butchers or local council workers.
I clearly recall Chester’s dynamic performances, playing out each character, when reading Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men to the class or reciting the chanted poetry of Vachel Lindsay: ‘Daniel’ and ‘The Congo’.
For drama, Chester had the trade teachers convert an old gold processing room into a theatre where we performed original ‘Hoopla’ Plays written by him. I believe that during the theatre conversion and cleaning of the cyanide sluice vats a significant amount of gold was recovered. This helped pay for the stage.
After reading Edgar Wallace’s crime stories we wrote short stories about a murder in the Buchan Caves. We then workshopped and performed a mock trial based upon the murder. We wrote Tall Stories imitating those we found in Bill Wannan’s Australasian Post page: ‘Come In Spinner’. Mine was about a sheep so large it required two men to use a huge crosscut saw at shearing time. It was published with an accompanying cartoon by Vane Lindesay! Vane then became a great friend of Chester and my interest in cartooning took off.
There we were in the late 50s using teaching aids such as tape recorders and an epi-diascope, making and binding our own books, or performing Chester’s original Ned Kelly play in the Caravan Park with wooden benches for the audience placed on the hill that sloped up to the school. I will always remember my brother, Russell, standing on a stump in the park, reciting the Jerilderie Letter as part of Chester’s production.
There was also a memorable trip to the Nicholson River, where we met an old alluvial prospector. We then learned how to pan for gold and even found some! It was a stifling hot day, so a few of us abandoned the search for the precious metal and found a large pool to cool off. Chester was not amused, and we were suitably admonished for failing to stick to the task at hand. Yes, Chester could deliver a very effective dressing down when it was required. He told me much, much later that he regretted the way he’d treated some students. But it was a tough school and firm, fair discipline was not easily achieved.
While Chester’s lessons were innovative, relevant, and designed to have real meaning for the students, he also took the time to get to know each of us individually. At the end of Form 2, he suggested that I leave the Tech and enrol at the High School, which I did. As I’d missed two years of French lessons, Chester tutored me for six months free of charge so I could catch up. Thus commenced a lifelong friendship. From him, I came to understand that a professional life in education was possible, along the way learning also to appreciate good red wines and classical music. Chester became a friend, mentor, sounding board and, eventually, a role model for my own teaching career.
I grew up in and around Bairnsdale in the 1950s and the 1960s. Chester taught at the Tech School during this time and although I attended the High School, I knew of him. Probably everyone in the district knew of him, as he busied himself learning and writing about his adopted hometown and its surrounding environment. He could and did talk to anyone and he was constantly curious, seeking answers and information about matters he was interested in. He imperilled his own teaching career a little by encouraging a number of Tech School students to switch to the High School, so they could better realise their obvious potential—John Merlo, Ray Heathcote, and Jim Baylis spring to mind; and there were others. Chester kept a mentoring eye on them and that is how I got to know him.
I offer the following as an indication of the measure of the man. It is no exaggeration to say that Chester saved my life. I was a very young fifteen when I did Form 6 at Bairnsdale High School, and I was not well supported at home. I was far from an ideal student, and was always in trouble at school, particularly with the principal. I failed the year and went off to work in Melbourne, where I soon realised that being stuck behind a desk all day had serious limitations. After a year I returned to Bairnsdale, determined to go back to school somehow, so I could then go to university. Chester learned of my mission and threw his considerable energies into helping me fulfil it. It took three years (and the transfer of a very antagonistic principal to Melbourne) to achieve. However, I was virtually penniless, with no means of support once I resigned from my job in Bairnsdale. Chester, fairly newly married and by now with a toddler, offered to pay my board for the school year. And he did.
I lost contact with Chester for many years, but when we reconnected about eight years ago, I told him I wanted to repay the money, with compounding interest and a healthy bonus to recognise his amazing generosity. He simply replied curtly, as if affronted, that he did not want it; and we could not convince him otherwise. We resolved in the end that a trust would be established in Chester’s name to sponsor Indigenous students, funded by a bequest from my partner and me. That will happen.
Chester was greatly loved and will be sadly missed.
In the late 1950s I was a staff member working on the Morning Argus newspaper and its sister publication Australasian Post. I received a letter from Chester Eagle, who at that time was teaching boys in a Gippsland school, stating how he admired my cartoon drawings illustrating bush and outback anecdotes. We met for coffee at the Legend Cafe in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and that was the beginning of a 60-year friendship of two facets. The first was an introduction to the Gippsland high country. One of Chester’s favourite places was Mount ‘Baldy’ (Baldhead). He mentioned once that when he died he would like his ashes scattered there. All these adventures were recorded in his 1971 book, Hail and Farewell, an evocation of Gippsland.
But this book was to come later, when Chester retired from teaching to write full-time. He could have accepted, but declined the offer of a staff position teaching at Melbourne Grammar. This period saw the genesis of the Trojan Press and the production of unique mini-mags, measuring 10cm x 18cm. These texts ranged over essays and memoirs, and numbered over sixty titles. My role, which gave rise to the second dimension of our friendship, was to design the two-colour covers and a suitable colophon for Trojan, a stylised head of a horse. Chester acquired a website which, to his happy satisfaction, resulted in a wide readership. These mini-mags are still on offer and can be downloaded free of copyright.
Sadly for Chester’s family and friends, this unique author is now no more.
I was introduced to Chester in 1995, in NYC East Village. My girlfriend at the time Fiona Brook introduced us. To this day I haven’t any idea how the two of them became acquainted, and now it is too late. We had lunch at a place directly in front of her apartment on 2nd Avenue. We talked about travel, specifically China and Chester’s interest in the culture and landscape and use. Chester was also very interested in photography and I was working as a shooter and printer in a darkroom. Suffice to say it was my life, and it still is. We had much to discuss and share and photography was going to be a continuing topic with Chester and me throughout our friendship.
Chester was pleased and very welcoming when I eventually emigrated five years later in 2000. I was accepted for immigration and was holding my visa, but the George W. Bush coup d’état in November 1999 sealed the deal for me. 9/11 was only a few months away and we all know the rest. When I arrived in Melbourne a few weeks later, we were invited to Ivanhoe and spent many afternoons in the overgrown garden on Langs Road, meeting Chester’s friends, his son and daughter. Of these Rodney Manning remained a constant as Chester’s wingman and he was an exhibiting artist in his own right. Rodney was an expert in a very unusual inkjet printing, as well as being professionally employed at the Melbourne museum.
When Fiona left the relationship I admit to being somewhat ‘high and dry’. Chester and Rodney travelled to Wheatsheaf, where I was marooned in a forest. They stopped for lunch, and for long discussions, some of which became quite … animated? These two Bolsheviks were very anti-American and would laugh heartily at Catholicism. Fair enough: no one is more anti-American than me. But to listen to me justify gun control and the necessary existence of the Pope is, well, just very funny all round. You see, if not for the Yanks in their tight pants and dance moves, you lot would be speaking Japanese today. And the Pacific theatre of war was hell. So you see, the ability to disagree and express strong feelings gave momentum to our friendship.
Chester was continuing his series of Letters. You know them? Close cropped images of single letters of the alphabet in differing fonts, colours and sizes, some of which I have here as gifts. I have always been an avid reader of fiction and history. Chester’s mini-books continued to arrive and we corresponded about the content and direction of his writing.
In closing, I would like to invoke the beautiful memory of an opera—Gibble Gabble Gobble— that Chester wrote the libretto for and which was performed in Bendigo. His writing work done, we sat together and enjoyed some of the funniest and silliest yet high–artiest things I have ever experienced.
Our friend Chester Eagle had a remarkable, memorable name that was well known by students in universities all over China. His books have been translated and studied by students there, and still are. But we know Chester from long afternoons drinking tea and talking about books, literature, history and art with his dear friend Brian. Being in the presence of these gentlemen was to be in the presence of intellectual giants. Their warmth, humility and humour made us feel like we were privy to a very special, expansive sort of friendship—one that was born from decades of knowing each other, but that was generous and robust enough to include new friends too.
And how lucky we were, as young as we were, to be friends with Chester.
Our friend Chester had a house in which his writing space was the room most filled with light, and his living room was always warmly dimmed during the day so that you’d sit on his sofa and feel like you were transported to a hallowed place where the outside world and its politics did not intrude on the realm of ideas.
Our friend Chester had a teapot shaped like Flinders Street Station, beautiful little teacups and matching saucers brought back from his travels to Europe; and multitudinous friends who brought him wine and cake. He wore perfectly ironed white shirts and silk cravats, which he ironed himself—an ironing board always standing to attention near his laundry.
He was the epitome of dignity and gravitas, and yet he would make fun of literary wankers. He had what Ernest Hemingway would refer to as ‘a built-in bullshit-detector’, one of the most finely tuned instruments there ever existed. This was why his writing was so direct and so moving.
Our friend Chester had a backyard inspired by a Murray Bail book, filled with eucalyptus trees. He was proud of his Finley farming heritage, and yet he was one of the most erudite and well-read humans we have ever known. He loved sharing his thoughts about the world, with the world. He sent us his mini-mags and all his books. We have a Chester Eagle shelf on our bookcase and I have gifted Chester Eagle books to friends who have recently become teachers (Emily at Preston) and friends dealing with loss (Travers).
Our friend Chester was always a perfect gentleman: kind, solicitous, diplomatic, generous, with a chuckle at things with which he disagreed. Chester spoke often of his ‘darling Miriam’, and ‘dear Aston’ the bird watcher, and how much he loved his children and enjoyed raising them. Chester came to our wedding, and met our sons when they were babies. He never gave us unsolicited parenting advice, because he only ever wanted to talk about books! And he was still reading all the latest literary and political magazines and newspapers!
We always imagined Chester to be invincible, that his enormous heart and soul and spirit—and of course, mind—would outlast us all. That was because we could not imagine a world without Chester. I still hear his voice in my head. I still remember his jokes, his views on religion and certain authors, his favourite book (The Leopard); and even the last piece he was working on (about a tree growing in the yard of his childhood home). I can still feel his firm handshake, and see the sparkle in his eyes when he talked about books and his calling to write, with the same fervour some people have about a religious calling.
In the middle of seeing a painting or reading a review, I will think of Chester and realise he is not here. I still can’t believe it. As I grow older, I am sure I will read certain of his works with new insight and understanding.
But there will never be another gentleman and friend like Chester Arthur Eagle.
A Bendigo musical acquaintance, Christopher Wilson, was very active in musical circles over many years until he became ill. The one thing he could easily do after his illness was compose. He discovered Chester Eagle (or maybe Chester discovered him) and he set to work composing music for Chester’s many opera libretti, ending up with quite a number of completed works.
In 2007, I was invited to join a production of his smallest work One, a chamber opera to celebrate the arrival of a newborn. Chester gives an introduction at the start of the video: https://youtu.be/VC3uLqQatZo
Several years later, in 2018, a group of us in and near Bendigo performed the second-shortest opera, Gibble Gabble Gobble. In the after-performance discussion starting at 40:50, Chester speaks about his work at 44:45: https://youtu.be/oPc3CBB0-ag
I would love to be involved in some future productions of Chester and Christoph’s operas. With some funding maybe we could expand into some of the longer ones that require more resources.
If you are moved to post your own tribute to Chester Eagle, please send an email to Brian Elkner.