Not Dark Yet: A Personal History by David Walker

It is perhaps not surprising that historians, as they edge towards retirement, should consider the possibility of reviewing their own life history. So, for example, among the generation of postwar historians, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Bernard Smith added powerful stories to our stock of Australian childhoods, while W.K. Hancock and Manning Clark, managing two volumes apiece, focused more on the life trajectory and career path. Now, at a time when there appears to be a growing appetite for biography and memoir, one senses that another generation of historians might be sizing up the options. For David Walker, there is a particular reason for turning to the genre. For some years suffering from macular degeneration, in 2004 he was pronounced legally blind. ‘I can no longer read a book, see faces or drive a car, but peripheral vision allows me to walk around, make a cup of coffee and put on a CD, though not always the one I expect.’ Walker makes light of the ambiguity of his condition: though ‘legally blind’ he is not allowed a seeing eye dog, because the fact that he has some vision would confuse the animal: ‘we’d quarrel at street corners fighting over who was boss.’ But of course the limit placed on his ability to read is a huge deprivation for a researcher, and it led him ‘to rethink the kind of history I was able to write’; he had to find ‘a more personal voice’. So he turned at first to the history of his own family, which, previously, he had tended to ignore. It was a voyage of discovery. Not Dark Yet embraces family history, memoir, and autobiography, though none of these labels quite fits; Walker sums it up in the subtitle, ‘a personal history’. The Walkers came from Burra in South Australia, a mining community where John Walker opened a shop in 1873 selling drapery, boots, and shoes. They were Methodists, hard-working, respectable, civic-minded. Their historian descendant regards them with a slightly amused respect – they do seem ‘rather austere and high-minded’. Yet he finds an interesting and revealing story buried in the historical record, a story which later generations had preferred to overlook. One of John’s sons, Alfred, married a Molly Day in 1907. The picturesque wedding at the Methodist church and ‘the sumptuous spread’ which followed were glowingly reported in the Burra Record. What was carefully ignored was that Molly was the adopted daughter of the Chinese storekeeper and market gardener Luke Hedow Day and his European wife, Hester. The locals would have privately noted that Molly herself was European and therefore free of presumed racial contamination. In the local Burra community, however, Luke, a churchgoer, seems to have won acceptance and a certain degree of respect, in spite of the widespread anti-Chinese sentiment that underpinned White Australia. Yet he could not escape its effects. Late in life he was denied an old age pension ‘by reason of the predominance of his Asiatic descent’. Then there are the stories of the uncles who fought in World War II. Laurie, a mere wisp of a youth, 165 cm and 48 kg, joined the RAAF and found himself in 1942 marooned on Ambon with the unfortunate Gull Force, many of whom were left to meet their fate at the hands of the invading Japanese. He was beheaded in the terrible Laha Massacres. Walker visited Ambon in 1997, and his research was able to correct the rather garbled version the family had acquired of Laurie’s death in this ‘shabby episode in Australian military history’. Laurie’s brother Alan also joined the RAAF, serving in Canada and Britain, and survived the war, apparently unmarked by the experience. Walker remembers him and his wife as a friendly and sociable couple, much more fun than his own parents. But late in life the war caught up with Alan. He had served in Bomber Command as a wireless operator; amongst the targets of their missions was Dresden. Alan’s logbook recorded the effects of the 4000- pound bombs they dropped – ‘wizard fires and glow’. The resulting firestorm killed at least 30,000 people. Those ‘wizard fires’ returned to haunt him. Reading recent accounts of the bombing of Dresden, he gained a new perspective of what he had been involved in. The mere mention of Dresden could reduce him to tears. The effects of war could be delayed but still deadly. The heart of Walker’s ‘personal history’ is the story of his parents, Gil and Glasson (a Scottish name, though usually for a boy). Gil was a dedicated primary school teacher. Although he had, in the cause of advancing his career, gained an Arts degree, books did not feature in the Walker household. Reading was not encouraged. Glasson believed that children reading more than was required for their education could lead to short-sightedness; nor was wearing glasses a good thing, as they only compounded the problem. For young David, much of the world passed by in a myopic blur. Gil and Glasson seem a rather humourless pair, and Walker, who himself has a mischievous sense of humour, has some fun at their expense, particularly in describing their late conversion to the pleasures and rewards of world travel. But while there is a developing respect and affection for his father, the quiet, steady achiever, Glasson is much more problematic. It is clear she had a strong and dominating personality, lacking in warmth; she was ‘never one for motherly sentiments’. But there was also thought to be an emotional fragility, which her family attributed to the dramatic childhood death of her elder sister Blanche from acute appendicitis, diagnosed too late: Glasson, the story went, had been devoted to Blanche and, devastated by her death, at the age of nine suffered a nervous breakdown (whatever that might have meant). David and his siblings knew that they were not to ‘try’ their mother, as the result could be disturbing for all concerned. One senses that Walker wonders whether this ‘emotional fragility’ was more imagined than real, for it gave her a psychological advantage in imposing her will on her children. Her sad ending years later, succumbing to Alzheimer’s, leaves something unresolved. Walker confesses that ‘it became increasingly difficult to remember how she was before Alzheimer’s claimed her’. When, at another point, he wonders whether we can ever know our parents, it is Glasson he has in mind. Walker has a storyteller’s relish in language and odd detail. When Gil buys their first car, a Vanguard, Glasson enjoys drawing on that old cliché, ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses’. Gil’s version of the survival of the fittest was that there was a ‘weeding-out process’ in life; what counted in the long run was ‘stickability’. In the family, eggs were referred to as ‘cackle berries’, and cornflakes as ‘elephants’ dandruff’. Glasson’s early success in callisthenics allows Walker to sketch in the historical context of the concern for national fitness which was linked to the then-popular eugenics movement, an area which has long been of interest to him. We are told of young David’s infatuation with Brigitte Bardot, and allowed a glimpse of his brief career as a bodgie, though the extent of his delinquency was that he had paid for his outfit out of money taken from his father’s wallet. Throughout the narrative, the historian is a tactful presence, ready to skilfully provide context or make sense of the ephemeral. Inevitably, Walker muses about the problems associated with memory, but unlike Sheila Fitzpatrick, who, in her recently published memoir, My Father’s Daughter (2010), is taken aback by the inaccuracy of some of her memories, Walker is more concerned with what the mind arbitrarily chooses to remember and forget, and how apparently inconsequential detail is retained while significant events are sometimes discarded. (To my shame, I cannot recall precisely where I was when I heard of President Kennedy’s assassination.) It occurs to me that Inga Clendinnen’s Tiger’s Eye (2000) provides an interesting comparison. It was born of a severe illness, and the writing initially was more in the nature of therapy. Tiger’s Eye was, as Clendinnen describes it, ‘a kind of accidental memoir’, originally not intended for publication. Walker, on the other hand, has thought long and hard about the journey he was undertaking into the darkness of the past, his past. Not Dark Yet, the product of that journey, is honest, sad, funny. David Walker has certainly found his ‘more personal voice’.

John Rickard

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