Grassy Hill

Time passed, however, as it has a way of doing, and my daughter, having moved to far north Queensland, took on a partner and they had two children: two boys who took my daughter’s surname (Eagle), not the partner’s.  The family line had moved on.  Another generation had come into being, and would replace my generation, over time.

My daughter took me on a couple of occasions to Cooktown, even further north than her city of Cairns, and we visited Grassy Hill, so named by Captain James Cook or members of his crew.  Some years later, I took my Chinese friend Zhan Chunjuan, of Hefei, Anhui Province, to Cooktown and we too surveyed the world from Grassy Hill.  It’s quite a low hill, but so placed that it offers a superb view of inland, ocean and coast.  By the time of this third visit I had read Cook’s Journals and had become aware of Grassy Hill’s place in the story of whites and blacks encountering each other in north Queensland and in other parts of Australia.  Over time, I noticed that my unending efforts to make meaning out of my place and circumstances were relocating themselves: Grassy Hill was at least partially replacing the Gippsland mountains in my thinking, just as my two grandsons were quietly and steadily replacing me.

Enter now another strand in my thinking.  In 1986 I published Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty, an account of Melbourne Grammar School as experienced by my generation of boys.  Hilary McPhee, the publisher, had subtitled the book ‘A boys’ eye view of an élite Australian school’.  I had tried very hard to express in this book the way the school operated to influence those who passed through it.  But what about the boys themselves, once they had left, and moved on to the rest of their lives?  Life is a tricky process, quite capable of upsetting those who try to define it, or say how it should be lived.  I decided to take a group of boys of my own generation, to follow their lives through to the end and show, as best I could, the interaction of the school’s efforts to shape them with all that fate and fortune might bring.

What I have just said is my account, my explanation, of why Grassy Hill begins and, for that matter, ends as it does.  It may be said that the beginning, the first scene, in a classroom, prefigures the ending, set on Grassy Hill itself, and the ending is already latent in the beginning.  By the time I wrote that first scene (June 2016) I had changed the last paragraph in my will so that it called on my descendants to scatter my ashes on Cooktown’s Grassy Hill rather than the bald mountain in Gippsland which I had once selected as the most meaningful place in my life.

Now a few thoughts about the book and the writing thereof.

When I was writing Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty, my characterisation of the school included many actual memories, and when I used them in my writing I attributed them to boys by using initials such as PJ, KL, GM, etc. These initials were chosen at random and in no way pointed to names of actual students of the time.  I was not concerned to write about individuals.  Much the same is true of this novel: novel, please note, meaning a work of the imagination.  In imagining the ten boys who will be followed from the end of their school days to somewhere near the end of their lives, my first concern was to go for variety and thematic interest.  The ten boys, considered as a group, needed to find pathways through life which, taken as a whole, amounted to an interesting collection of pathways and fates.  It becomes apparent very early on in the novel that the ten boys are strands of the story rather than pillars of character, so that the book may choose to concentrate, and frequently does, on people who have found their way into the novel by something pretty close to chance.  I have in mind Ariadne Berg, mother of Kim Berg, and Julie Wade, who gets a passing mention as a schoolgirl in the care of Margaret Nilsson at the nearby girls’ school, but blossoms, years later, to be the central figure in the novel’s finest moment at Ormiston, a property in Victoria’s western district.  Much the same is true of Anita Silbermann who is Sandy Clarkson’s first sexual partner, but reappears much later in the book for no better reason than that readers may be curious to know what became of her!  In this sense the novel, for it is one, is not committed to the notion of a formal, structured plot.  Events are presented to readers in a way that allows them to keep track, as we might say, of the book’s various characters but the task of presenting the lives of the ten ‘boys’ (or Old Boys) with any formal completeness is beyond the powers of the writer and the scope of the book.

So why write it?  What does it show?  I suppose my answer to those questions is that the book is a search for the existence of meaning, and such moments of meaning as the book provides its readers, happen incidentally, here and there, fleetingly yes, but in any over-arching way, no.  Readers will note the last word of the book, denying any supply of meaning to the idea of an after-life, or a return to earth in some altered form.  We have to make the most of the earth, and the life, we’re given, but the job – the responsibility – is ours and the odds may well be against us.

So my theme is what happens to us in our lives, whether planned, unexpected, or quite arbitrary.  If I think of the young men who were my actual contemporaries, I dare say I might have selected an even more varied group than the characters of my book, but then I would have been exerting a shaping influence that I had decided to deny myself.  My characters are ordinary enough and certainly not extraordinary, even if one of them becomes Premier of his state for a time, and another becomes an historian of some modest achievement.  Each of them gets a life and it’s an assertion of the book that from some detached, objective point of view all lives are equally interesting.  Hence my willingness to regard ‘minor’ characters, people who merely wander into the book’s events, as equal to, or almost equal to, the ten continuing characters as objects of the reader’s interest.  I’m sure many readers will find this disconcerting, but I can only plead in my defence that what I am saying is the basis on which the book has been built.

One last word.  I find it revealing that the book both does, and does not, quite, end where it began, or begin where it ends.  The book is named Grassy Hill because it’s the place where we must position ourselves in order to understand it.  On the first page the boys are both considering what the hill may mean in their country’s history (the aim of Rhonda Mathieson’s history lesson) and are in some small, perhaps tiny, way becoming aware that their own lives will feed into the tides, floods, streamlets and watercourses of history, though any such realisation will occur to them in only fleeting moments and that the best moment to consider and/or evaluate a life – their life, anybody’s life – is the moment when it ends.  At the beginning of the book we can know the lives of Cook and his sailors, and even, possibly, the aboriginal people mentioned in Mark McKenna’s book From The Edge which is briefly referred to in the text by CC, the novel’s resident historian, but we can’t yet know the lives of our ten Old Boys or their numerous partners, friends, contacts and children also mentioned in the book’s meanderings until these people too, in their turn, reach the end of their journey, as Noel McGraw is doing in the final pages.  It is only when his ashes are thrown to the winds by Lola, his life’s companion, that we can say he has reached Grassy Hill in its metaphorical sense as opposed to its geographical position.

Discussing this last book in this way means that I am inviting readers to compare the way its title – like the earlier (1997) title Wainwrights’ Mountain – suggests to the reader the best way to read, and having read, the best way to interpret it.