Madeleine (9 page)

The Octopus moved in a pack on campus, finding strength in numbers in an environment where beauty could still trump brains and where men almost always had the best parts. Coming of age almost a decade before the start of the feminist revolution—Germaine Greer had not yet arrived at the campus—they teetered on the brink of an independence taken for granted by later generations.

The glue that held the teenagers together was their love of the theatre and writing and their determination to be different. They scarcely realised it at the time, but for many language was an obsession.
¹
Madeleine threw herself into the avant-garde SUDS with its repertoire of Pinter and Genet and Ionesco. And the girls attached themselves to the office of the student newspaper,
Honi Soit
, where Clive James and his mentor Philip Graham, known across the campus as Chester, were accorded rockstar status.

University life was exciting for Madeleine. She was still living at home, which was now at Balmoral on the North Shore. Val had long wanted to move out of the house that Ted had built with Sylvette in Castlecrag. Finally Ted was making enough money at the bar to move from Castlecrag, and the St Johns sold Number 9 and were renting a flat at Balmoral while they looked for another house. The flat had lovely views but it was cramped—not that Madeleine was around much.

She thrived on the academic work in her Arts course, especially English literature, and she also threw herself into campus life, relishing the freedom and the exposure to young men after life in a single-sex school. She stayed out late for meetings, rehearsals and parties, having a ‘grand old time' and a life of her own.
²
But the tension was growing between Madeleine and Val, who was pregnant again. One day after making breakfast for the family, cutting Colette's lunch and settling Oliver with his toys, Val sat down in the living room with a tray to have a quiet breakfast. Madeleine was at the piano. ‘She banged away as loudly as she could and when I asked if she could play something more restful while I had my breakfast, she took no notice. I took my tray back to the kitchen and I was so upset, I could not stop shaking. Later that day I had a miscarriage,' Val told Florence, decades later.
³
Ted ordered Madeleine to stop playing the piano, and Madeleine was aggrieved. She believed Ted blamed her for the miscarriage.
⁴
They were both determined, stubborn characters and they clashed more often as Madeleine became more independent.

On campus, 1959 was proving to be a very good year. Those who hovered around
Honi Soit
and SUDS in that period read like a list of Australia's culture shapers: Clive James, Les Murray and his rival in poetry Geoffrey Lehmann, Richard Walsh, Mungo MacCallum and, later, Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford and John Gaden.

Honi Soit
reflected the literary rather than the political enthusiasms of its editors and staff. It was a vibrant and intellectual atmosphere for the Octopus members, but in those pre-feminist days women were heavily outnumbered by the men who ran student clubs and activities. Men edited
Honi Soit
; men decided what plays would be produced; men were selected to head the Student Representative Council. Women were good for conversation, as well as sex, but everyone knew that the men would take the best jobs. Clive James recalled that women were required to be ‘decorative…In those days, the glamour girls ruled, and we men were unreconstructed in every way.'
⁵
Madeleine was definitely not in the glamour camp in her first year.

Some of the Octopus women were writers, but they were discouraged by the men, and the university revues and the articles in
Honi Soit
were dominated by the male voice. The girls spoke the lines on stage (sometimes) and sub-edited the boys' masterpieces. Looking back, Mungo MacCallum recalled that his generation of students ‘talked as equals, but the assumption was that the leading roles would be taken by men'.
⁶
The October edition of
Honi Soit
carried pictures of the (male) ‘stars' and the (female) ‘subs'—with Richard Walsh holding ‘the distinction of being the only male on the sub-editing staff'.
⁷

Madeleine was among the sub-editors, but the future Booker Prize shortlistee was never published by her student paper. Colleen Olliffe, one of the Octopus girls, remembered that in 1959 ‘we all wanted to write, but most of us were persuaded out of it'.
⁸
Another member, Jane Iliff, said, ‘Most of us came from all-girl schools and had no experience of boys, of how they show off and bully.' Once, having managed to get a poem published, Jane found that Clive James was not impressed.
⁹
When Colleen was also published—with a parody of one of Clive's poems—he bailed her up in the lunch queue: ‘Not bad kid, but don't do it again.'
¹⁰
Sue McGowan, who later married Mungo, was roped into long meetings of the Writers, Artists and Composers Group, which consisted largely of Geoffrey Lehmann and Les Murray reading their poetry while the girls listened.

The Octopus struck back, making a pact to write regularly for each other and to swap their pieces for peer review. It was a short-lived experiment that included a joint poem, one line each. But the girls took their studies seriously. They didn't skip lectures. Sue remembered regular meetings in each other's homes to talk about their academic work.
¹¹

But for both sexes, university was life-changing. Mungo found university liberating. ‘It didn't matter which schools you had been to, whether you had been a prefect or not,' he recalled.
¹²
Richard Walsh and his friend Peter Grose, later a journalist, advertising executive, publisher and writer, also signed up for
Honi Soit
, gathering their courage and bursting into the office to offer their services. ‘It seemed like a citadel,' Richard recalled. He and Peter were allowed to stay, working alongside the Octopus girls who had signed up as subs. ‘It was fabulous, we went to
Honi Soit
every day. It was a great thing to do—and of course it was good to be with the girls.'
¹³

Madeleine found university more inclusive than Queenwood. ‘This is what it is all about,' she told Jonette Jarvis when the younger girl attended a SUDS performance. ‘Don't worry if you don't fit in at school, you will fit in here.'
¹⁴

There was no bar on campus so the
Honi
set drank at the Forest Lodge pub on the other side of Parramatta Road, where Clive James held court at his own table. Sue McGowan was stunned one day when he announced: ‘What is meant by the word, intellectuals? It's us!'
¹⁵

At the Forest Lodge, the young men and women plotted the next theatrical production and worked out where the party would be on Saturday night. They discovered Vadim's, just off the main strip of Kings Cross, virtually the only late-night eating spot in Sydney. They drank wine from teapots to avoid the police and gawked at the city's intellectual class, among them Harry Kippax, the legendary theatre critic from the
Sydney Morning Herald
, who would repair there as the curtain came down to write his review in leisurely fashion, calling it in to the copytakers for the morning edition.

Madeleine and her friends spent hours in Manning House, drinking bad coffee and styling themselves as pre-Raphaelites. They were mad about Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and they didn't mind being labelled beatniks. Madeleine was becoming confident in her new style and identity. One day, in the city, she ran into former Queenwood classmate Angela Wills. Angela was dressed for the office while Madeleine was sporting a dark dirndl skirt, black stockings and an oversized black jumper. She was off to a coffee shop in Rowe Street, a popular 1950s Sydney laneway that offered a taste of the alternative life.
¹⁶

Sometimes the men circled the women at Manning House in the mating rituals of the time, often more in hope than deed. ‘A great many of us were from single-sex schools and the reason why we could not sleep with the girls was not the lack of the pill but inexperience,' Mungo said. ‘There was no great women's lib push, but it would be unfair to say they were regarded as nothing more than objects of seduction.'
¹⁷

In 1959, the Octopus girls were still only seventeen—this was before New South Wales added an extra year of high school. While some were keen to lose their virginity, they lived at a time when it was difficult to avoid pregnancy. You had to know which doctor would prescribe the pill or you risked a shotgun wedding, adoption or a dangerous illegal abortion. Keeping a child as a single mother was almost unheard of.

Winton Higgins, later a lawyer and academic, was one of Madeleine's best friends. Their relationship was platonic but Madeleine's intellect and personality thrilled Higgins. He had known few girls growing up. To Winton, Madeleine, with her French background, love of literature and individual style, represented ‘Life with a capital L'.
¹⁸

The freshers watched French movies and competed to recommend the latest novel. In this febrile atmosphere, Madeleine was intellectually able, but she was overlooked by the leading men on campus. Clive James recalled those days: ‘I had absolutely no idea she was such a writing talent…she was a writer, a real one. But at that stage she hadn't written anything, so perhaps we can forgive ourselves for not spotting that there was a genius in our midst.'
¹⁹
Bruce Beresford was a close friend in later years, but in 1959 he didn't pay her much attention. Like almost everyone else, he was in love with Danne Emerson.

Danne was the adored beauty from a Catholic girls' school let loose, first on the Newman Society on campus and then later on the
Honi Soit
set. Tall and beautiful with a natural sexual magnetism, Danne could easily have been the model for Gillian Selkirk, the mistress in Madeleine's 1996 novel,
A Pure Clear Light
. Among those who longed for her that year was a young Bob Ellis. Much later, he would write that she was ‘beautiful, blonde, international, proud and doomed'.
²⁰

Madeleine, known now as Maddy, may have been somewhat less sought after, but Richard Walsh noted her high sexual energy.
²¹
She had a crush on Chester and later on Charles Manning, a close friend of Colleen. And she made no secret of her determination to ‘have sex'.
²²

But it was on stage that Madeleine shone, surprising everyone by being cast in a lead role in the University Revue in May. The show was called
Dead Centre
, with skits by Clive James among others, and Madeleine's appearance as Lolita in ‘The True Story of Lolita Montez', a piece written by Chester and John (later Katherine) Cummings, became part of Octopus lore.
²³

Madeleine was not the only Octopus member who made it into the revue that year. It was unheard of for freshers to get parts, yet in 1959 Marilyn Taylor was also in the show, appearing in four different guises. Marilyn had arrived on campus with the express purpose of joining SUDS and becoming an actor. Colleen Olliffe had nursed a similar ambition and would later score serious acting parts on campus. Some of the Octopus members toiled behind the scenes for
Dead Centre
. Libby Smith did costumes; Sue McGowan was on makeup. Madeleine was not a natural actor, although she had inherited the St John gift of mimicry. But she saw herself as something of a
femme fatale
, even if she was buried in a duffel jacket and oversized jumpers. The role of Lolita Montez appealed to those fantasies, and she adored the vintage dress she wore on stage. She also appeared as Nancy Mitford in another skit and as a shopper in a third. Madeleine was doing well.

In September of that first year, most of the Octopus were involved in Victoriana, the music-hall-style entertainment organised by Pam Threthowan. Pam had brought the idea with her from the UK and produced it as a SUDS fundraiser in 1959. It eventually spread off campus to the North Shore and the city. Maddy, Colleen, Marilyn and Sue as well as Helen Goldstein, Libby Smith and Judy MacGregor-Smith, who were also Octopus members, were all part of the scene.
²⁴

Libby spent her fresher year boarding at a Salvation Army hostel in South Dowling Street, Surry Hills, and Madeleine took her under her wing. ‘She was very generous and kind,' Libby recalled. ‘She had a strong impact on my life. Everyone else was city and I was country. I had never been exposed to the plummy accents, the domestic standards.'
²⁵
Madeleine saw herself as Libby's teacher and guide, intent on schooling her in the right style, the right food, and the right table settings. The kindness was real, but Madeleine was also tricky. As the Octopus girls spread out on the tables in the Manning House cafe, Madeleine occasionally sighed: ‘I like Colleen and Libby best because they are always the nicest to me.'
²⁶

At the end of first year, Libby and Jane Iliff gravitated to the more political group, the Sydney Push. Madeleine was more cautious. Years later she wrote to her cousin, Antony Minchin:

Oh, and, The Push. Oh God, the big P. I used to get glimpses of them around Syd Univ; they scared the wits out of me, with their combination of Total Self-Assurance verging on love, & air of being thoroughly unwashed, not to say Filthy & basic thoroughgoing cynicism I can see that the whole package would've been irresistible to a girl with a bit of Spirit but I, e.g. wasn't.
²⁷

Libby soon had a boyfriend, Albie Thoms, who would go on to become a radical filmmaker. And Jane horrified her parents by moving in with her boyfriend. Madeleine's gang was branching out and she was being left behind. Marilyn knew that Maddy, despite her social self-confidence and outspoken manner, was sometimes unhappy about not being pretty and not having a boyfriend. Clive James recalled that she ‘wasn't your average soubrette…She wore a lot of psychic armour, obviously feeling she was being got at'.
²⁸
By then her circle knew about her ‘wicked stepmother' and the mother whom she idealised. Madeleine's story of abandonment and loss set her apart. It became her calling card and invariably engendered sympathy. No one who met her throughout her adult years was left in doubt about the childhood trauma she had suffered.