My guilty admission this morning – my usual routine is to check my phone before getting out of bed – firstly to see the time, then the weather report, followed by where my book sits on Amazon’s Bestsellers list, how many people have read my blogs and which countries they’re from, how my shares are doing, then a few notifications from Facebook and Instagram. My algorithms send me clips of live music, poetry, laughing babies and warm-fuzzy animal stories.
The Barossa has been hanging out for a big predicted rain. We desperately need it. Rainwater tanks are depleted, gardens dry and needing too much water. The radar map this morning showed a big lump of rain heading our way – fifteen millimeters predicted for today, forty tomorrow. I got up, opened the curtains, and the window wide. I could smell rain coming. It hadn’t arrived yet but that lovely smell of summer rain was in my air – perhaps recognising it comes from years of farming.
My phone told me it was the twenty eighth of February. Oh no, last day of the month. Blog day. It had snuck up on me. I’d had an idea recently of retrieving my old diaries from high school days. Most of the stuff in them would be too embarrassing to share, but maybe I could make an interesting story out of some of it.
I visualised where they were, these diaries – in the drawer of an old cedar chest. I should bring them out, I thought, and put them with my reams of writings – in a cupboard in my office. But there’s not enough room there. Is there something I could take out to make room for the diaries? I remembered a manuscript someone had sent me years ago – more than three hundred pages. I could get rid of that. I tried to recall how I had come by this work.
I remembered my mother telling me, somewhere in my childhood, of a boy she had gone to school with, and who had become famous. She knew him as Lance Ingram – a lad who was always in trouble with the teachers. His father had abandoned his mother and him, when he was very young, and his mother had then fostered him into a family.
‘You’ll end up in the gutter, Ingram,’ one of his teachers had said to him. A few years ago, after wondering what had become of him, my mum must have done some research and discovered that he had become a famous opera singer, and had changed his name to Albert Lance. It more than piqued her interest. When my mum got on a project like this she would become fully committed. After following a trail, she came across someone who had been fascinated enough with Lance’s life story to write his biography. He was Doug Holden – a radio broadcaster, journalist and writer.
At that time I had been in the process of polishing my own memoir in preparation for submission to publishers. Mum had put him in touch with me and he’d sent me the sixth draft of his manuscript – the now published ‘Australia’s Lost Tenor’ (Albert Lance) that I had never read – probably because of being totally involved in my own story at the time, and I’d forgotten about it.
Even before breakfast today, I went to this cupboard in my office and found the manuscript.
This is the cover blurb –
‘In 2009 I met a man living outside Nice in the south of France, an 84 year old Australian whose achievements, from more than humble beginnings to the pinnacle of operatic success, are truly worthy of description as one of the great untold Australian stories.
Lance Albert Ingram of Medindie, South Australia – abandoned by his father and given over to care by his mother, escaped death from meningitis, and was to sing his way into history.
From Adelaide cotton-mill worker to Melbourne metal-worker to look-out for sly two-up schools, through vaudeville and the Australian cafe scene, he went on to sing before the Queen, as Australia’s principal tenor. He performed with Dame Joan Sutherland, sang tenor to the great Maria Callas, was principal tenor of France for more than twenty years, and had French citizenship personally bestowed upon him by President de Gaulle.
In this biography, broadcaster, writer and journalist Doug Holden, matches the wit and wisdom of Ingram’s recollections with painstaking research on the man and his times, and an eye for what seemingly basic ingredients can lead to greatness.
Along the way, never before revealed insights are given into what was the complex nature of the mighty diva Callas – the other side of her nature as directly witnessed, suffered and endured by Ingram on his way to becoming a singing immortal.
It is a long-needed biography of a man little known in his homeland – a living Australian treasure and cultural icon.’ –
Doug Holden
There are numerous YouTube videos of him, which of course I will be listening to – probably later today. And I read the first ten or so pages of the manuscript at breakfast. What a find – all as a result of my considering retrieving my old teenage diaries.
While in an op shop recently, I came across another Tim Winton book, which brought on the usual delight and excitement at finding something of his. ‘The Riders,’ published in 1994, brings my TW collection to a total of thirteen. First page had me in love with his prose once again. What a way to start a story, to reel the reader instantly in. The setting reminded me of the hut I was brought to as a young farmer’s wife.
From ‘The Riders’ – page one
‘With the north wind hard at his back, Scully stood in the doorway and sniffed. The cold breeze charged into the house, finding every recess and shadowy hollow. It rattled boards upstairs and lifted scabs of paint from the walls to come back full in his face smelling of mildew, turf, soot, birdshit, Worcestershire sauce and the sealed-up scent of the dead and forgotten. He scraped his muddy boots on the flagstones and closed the door behind him. The sudden noise caused an explosion in the chimney as jackdaws fled their fortress of twigs in the fireplace. His heart racing, he listened to them batter skyward, out into the failing day, and when they were gone he lit a match and set it amongst the debris. In a moment fire roared like a mob in the hearth and gave off a sudden, shifting light. The walls were green-streaked, the beams overhead swathed in webs and the floor swimming with trash, but he was comforted by the new sound and light in the place, something present besides his own breathing.’
What a writer -Tim Winton. What an imagination. What visual images you must have stored over your lifetime. There is only one of his books I have put aside, for now. It is his latest ‘Juice.’ It is a futuristic story – quite timely I will admit, as we all watch the future hurtling towards us at a great and sometimes frightening rate.
Tim, I am guessing, did a lot of research in writing this one. It doesn’t seem to come naturally to him. It’s set in a future world, a foreign world. Tim usually draws on his images of the environment he knows and is passionate about. This story ‘Juice’, at one hundred pages in, hasn’t given me the rich Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence, Tim Winton-type prose I take so much pleasure in. I’m finding it hard work, but I’ll come back to it.
I’m excited about exploring the contents of my old diaries. I feel optimistic that I might be able to make use of them somehow – edited a little to put up here, or perhaps there is a short story to be found amongst them – a story of the joys and heart-aches of being a teenager in the sixties. Short stories – the way to go as a writer on her homeward run – considering my autobiography took me ten years to write and polish.
Well folks, looking forward to seeing what my next blog will divulge.
Take care,
Warmly,
Sue
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