Love's Obsession (16 page)

Jim and Eve stopped at Strath to visit Aunt Roslyn, and after lunch walked across the rough road and open fields to inspect The Mount. Jim's uncle Athol had abandoned the house in 1927, leaving it vacant after selling the furniture. From time to time people squatted in different parts of the building, but for many years it was completely deserted. During the Second World War Athol made the house and thirty acres of land available to the Women's Land Army and these young women were the only people who had lived in the house in recent years.
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The two storeys were of dark granite blocks. Even darker slate roofing sagged and gaped. One upstairs room opened onto a verandah with a stone balustrade and a tall turret sprouting from the roof above the main entrance. Hand in hand they walked past the granite gateposts, each topped with a sandstone folly. Weeds smothered the downstairs verandahs. Eve thought it looked like a neglected Bisterne.

Jim and Eve stepped onto the front verandah and glanced back over the sheep paddocks sloping towards the willow-fringed Macquarie River. Clusters of cream-coloured roses competed with rampant honeysuckle. Zinnias and Michaelmas daisies grew below the balustrade alongside straggly tomatoes, presumably self-sown. They walked through the front door into the entrance hall and the atmosphere lightened. Jim pointed out the William Morris wallpaper to Eve and she was surprised it had survived so many years of neglect. Through the entrance hall they discovered what looked like a drawing room, separated from a similar room mirrored on the other side of the archway. In their imagination they lined the room, from floor to ceiling, with bookshelves and special cabinets for coins.

A cedar stairway led from the central area to a storey above and on to an attic, but the rickety stairs looked precarious. Rooms clustered around the inner stairwell—Jim explained that there were fifty in all. One with a series of tall windows topped with smaller windows of decorative leadlight, opened onto a stone balcony overlooking sheep paddocks. In another was a marble fireplace. A rusting iron bedstead was a reminder of the Land Army's occupation. Downstairs they explored the ballroom at the back of the house. It was enormous, with immensely high ceilings. Could this solve their problems? They mentally furnished it with trestle tables and workbenches and peopled it with students mending pottery and drawing. A side verandah overlooked what must once have been a formal garden but the stone fountain stood desolate, abandoned amongst the weeds. In the kitchen and basement they found a defunct dumb waiter and cool storerooms. A water pump outside the kitchen sat over a well and behind it what looked like a bakehouse.

How would they possibly furnish the place? What would it cost to connect electricity? How would they manage with only one bathroom? Surely those marvellous marble fireplaces would be inefficient. How would they fund it? Jim made a mental list of necessary improvements, while Eve planned her garden. Could they have poultry? Of course they would want cats, but what about a dog? If they had children there would be acres of countryside to roam. ‘How cold does it get in Bathurst?' Eve asked.

One look between them sealed its fate. They decided they must have The Mount.

By early 1951 letters to Eve Dray were addressed to The Mount and some time later Jim wrote to their friend Judith Stylianou:

We are nearly straight at long last and are now settled in the country about 130 miles from Sydney. I go down to lecture every second week and spend the rest of my time up here. We have all our technical work and our store-rooms in the country and only use Sydney as a shop window for the finest objects or those that we need for teaching purposes. At long last I have got all my books together in one spot and we are really quite comfortable, with excellent working conditions … As I obviously have not written to you for so long, I expect that I forgot to tell you that Eve and I got married at the beginning of the year.
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Jim's father and Aunt Roslyn attended the wedding ceremony, along with the two witnesses: Ron Byatt, a friend from the Numismatic Society, and Margery Dray, who flew to Australia for her daughter's wedding and stayed on for six months at The Mount. For the sake of form, Eve's address was given as Jim's cousin's place. It was a quiet affair. Eleanor, too, would remarry that year.

Eve's father thanked her for sending a photo of The Mount but seemed confused. ‘What is it? Your house? Museum? Hotel? Then what has become of the Nicholson Museum? And when are you coming out to Cyprus?
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Two years later he worried: ‘Why live in a 30 room house with 5 fires and chickens and ducks and four feet of water all round?
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It all seemed a waste of a good education.

Jim commuted to and from Sydney. Sometimes he drove, often he took the train. Eve remained attached to the university but worked at The Mount and seldom accompanied Jim to Sydney. When apart, the postal service could scarcely keep up with their correspondence. ‘Darling, as you're still here (whiffling peacefully), you really know all the news there is … Just time to sort out your pills before I wake you.' Eve hid the letter in Jim's razor case where he would find it when he arrived in Sydney.
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And Jim in Sydney wrote: ‘Darling, Just a note to say how very much I miss you and wish I hadn't got to come down like this.
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Gradually more and more work found its way to Bathurst, so much so that it became difficult to disentangle personal and professional effects. Library books and university files went to Bathurst. Much of the archaeological material arriving at the Nicholson was also sent to Bathurst to be housed in the ballroom at The Mount for processing and study. At last Jim had his ‘laboratory' where students could work on archaeological material.

Life at The Mount was unconventional. To visiting students it was ‘pure heaven', like something out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse.
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A ‘gothic' mansion of never-ending rooms and stairways, two sitting rooms with more books than the university's Fisher Library, and an ‘old retainer', Callan, setting the fireplaces in the evening. In the ballroom students could handle Bronze Age daggers and pottery sherds, or skulls from Jericho.

The house remained partly derelict well into the 1960s and visitors remember rain dripping into buckets in the ballroom. Bitterly cold in winter, Eve worked in the ballroom in gloves, rugged up in a coat and blankets. The open fires did little to heat the cavernous rooms. As she had in Cyprus, Eve asked local tradesmen to make drawing tools that she designed herself—a special frame to help her to draw large pots, knives for making plaster copies of coins.
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She taught students the basics of drawing but few could manage the concentration and single-minded focus. Years later Basil said that Eve was one of the three best archaeological draughtsmen he had ever known. She was meticulous but slow. She would not even begin a drawing unless she had a clear four hours to spare.
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This was rare, given her other duties.

Eve claimed responsibility for much of the unconventionality of the house.
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It was she who put the Red Polished Bronze Age pot in the bathroom for toothbrushes and she who insisted the baby orphaned lamb be kept warm in the room beside the kitchen. She ran the household with little domestic help, although for some time a Cypriot immigrant girl, Maroulla, cooked for them. Maroulla's speciality was rabbit stew, Basil was a fair shot, and rabbits were prolific. Although unusual for a conservative 1950s Australian palate, anything was an improvement on Jim's curries and haggis, which he insisted on preparing every New Year's Eve. ‘A blackened monstrosity that nobody could eat. It was Medieval', Basil recalled.
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Visitors arrived regularly for lunch or the weekend or for more extended periods. Jim charmed visitors and monopolised the conversation. Sometimes students visited with their parents, at other times in small groups. In later years postgraduate students might live there for weeks on end. Everyone was expected to become part of the household and to follow its daily rituals. Eggs for breakfast, soup for lunch, bountiful sherry, brandy and conversation before the evening meal, usually turkey. A story circulated that some of the turkeys on the menu had died of old age, but Eve strenuously denied this. Turkeys were ubiquitous. Eve raised them for the Christmas trade and made sure that university staff and friends were well supplied. Staff remember Jim and Eve descending on the university laden with turkeys and vegetables and homemade plum jam full of seeds.

Jim Stewart was wealthy, clever and spoilt, a short man with a tendency to grow fat as he aged, his ginger hair showing signs of premature balding and straggly wisps falling over the freckles on his brow. In any gathering people gravitated to him and convivial drinking lasted long into the night. Few could match his wit or his capacity for drink. He was happiest in conversation and loathed the diplomacy and bureaucratic manoeuvres that administration required, which was odd, given his obsession with lists and plans and detailed, often exaggerated, budgets. He was generous to friends, polite to those he respected, in particular older colleagues or family friends.

Eve came alive in the country. The Callans, father and son, were employed to manage outdoors and all the farming and grazing land was tenanted, but Eve was in charge of the turkeys. Her diaries detail her farming world—lambs bottle-fed, eggs collected, turkeys slaughtered, problems with poultry diseases. Basil's wife Ruth, from a serious farming family in Queensland, thought it resembled a Victorian lady's idea of a poultry farm.
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And then there were the cats. Jim loved cats. At Bellapais strays slipped into the storeroom and curled up in the Bronze Age pots dug from the tombs at Vounous. At Eichstätt long-haired cats warmed his bed and shared his food. Wherever he was, Jim fed homeless kittens. In Sydney Mrs S. Catty ruled the Edgecliff house. A thin grey cat with white Roman nose and cheeks, she curled across Jim's shoulders in a photo that was one of Eve's favourites. Both her kittens, Sir Marcus Bibulus and Corrie, were jet black.

A skulk of cats greeted visitors to The Mount and it is their presence that most people remember vividly. Like the fine gradations of servants in an English manor house, the cats formed a strict hierarchy. There were outside cats and inside cats, outside/inside cats and inside/outside ones. Students learned to prepare for the evening cry of ‘Cats', when all work ceased and mountains of boiled rabbit were cut up and distributed amongst them. After dinner a similar cry went up and tea towels were exchanged so that those used to dry the cats' bowls were not used on the human crockery.
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Mrs S. Catty's son Marcus Bibulus, DD, Bishop of Ophir, was for many years the most senior indoor cat at The Mount and behaved accordingly. His photo is the only one from this period that is enlarged. An enormous black tom with a flick of white at his breast, he held himself with the air of noble lineage. He had sired many of the outdoor cats and a few of the indoor ones and took precedence over sundry waifs and strays at mealtimes.

A student remembered the Bishop of Bathurst arriving for lunch. ‘I don't think you've met the Bishop of Ophir, have you', Jim remarked casually as he ushered His Grace into the dining room. Puzzled at the idea that a small village outside Bathurst might boast such an appointment, the bishop shook his head: ‘I wasn't aware such a person existed.' Jim gestured to a large black cat overflowing the dining room chair at the end of the table. He made the introductions. ‘Meet Sir Marcus Bibulus, DD', Jim said as he settled into the chair at the other end of the long table. Both purred as the Bishop feigned sophisticated amusement.
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Another visitor remembered enjoying coffee with Jim and Eve in the sitting room one afternoon. Marcus Bibulus entered and walked purposefully towards Jim, cocked his head in the direction of the door, and demanded Jim stand. As directed, Jim followed Sir Marcus, who led him to the gun cabinet in the hallway. With gun in hand Jim followed the cat through the front door, whereupon Sir Marcus stared in the direction of a brown snake coiled on the grass within striking distance of the turkeys' wire pen. Having dispatched the snake, Jim returned to the house, locked the gun away and the two settled back in front of the fire in companionable silence. No one was surprised by the cat's behaviour.
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Along with the bishop's mother, Mrs S. Catty (aka Scatty), Lusagh the dog and the hordes of outside cats, Marcus Bibulus is immortalised in the preface to ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age', Jim's volume in The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, published in 1962: ‘Indeed I owe a great deal to my animals for distracting me.
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At the beginning of 1950 Jim sent copies of exam papers to his friend Winifred Lamb at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She was especially impressed by the paper that Basil Hennessy had written and suggested he would be a suitable applicant for a scholarship with the British School at Ankara.
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At the same time, Jim persuaded Sydney University to contribute, together with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to excavations on Cyprus directed by Joan du Plat Taylor at the mining settlement of Myrtou-Pighades and by Terence Mitford at Kouklia. Basil was accepted as the inaugural scholar at the British School of Archaeology at Ankara and left Australia at the end of the year, although he first visited Cyprus. Despite the scholarship being Basil's and this his first excursion into field archaeology, the directions and control were all Jim's. Basil left Australia with a typed list of instructions that included everything from hiring a bicycle to sherd collecting and working in the Cyprus Museum. Point four of fifteen said: ‘I want you to make the acquaintance of Petro Colocassides at the earliest opportunity. He is at the top of Onasagoras Street, about ten (10) minutes from the Museum. Do not discuss any of your dealings with him in the presence of any of the members of the Museum staff. I attach a list of things which I wish you to deal with chez Petro.
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