Silver Wattle (35 page)

‘What about a native bear then?’ Hugh suggested. ‘People seem to like them.’

Freddy scratched his chin. ‘One of Australia’s national symbols? Just as many of them are killed in a season. I think you two have been hanging around the Vegetarian Cafe too long. Children might think those animals are cute but their parents couldn’t care less.’

He waved a box of cigars in front of Hugh, who declined, and took one himself.

I was on the verge of tears. My script did not have a flaw: the whole premise was wrong. I stared at the rope around the polar bear’s muzzle. I did not blame Freddy. He was only speaking the truth. Who was going to take a story about a possum seriously? I lived in a much kinder world with Uncle Ota, Ranjana and Klara. Even my burly cameraman would not hurt a lamb—let alone eat one. But why did Freddy call us here if he was only going to scoff at the script?

‘If the story is so out of touch with what people think, why did you want to see us?’ I asked him. ‘Are you trying to humiliate us?’

Freddy’s eyes opened with surprise. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Because this is so different from the pictures that are being produced here it’s refreshing. I’m excited about it—and believe me, that’s rare.’

I was too stunned to take in immediately what Freddy had said. A moment ago I had been ready to leave.

He laughed and shook his head. ‘You artists are all the same—too sensitive! I tell you there are flaws in your script and you think I’m saying the whole thing is trash. What you need to do is get your idea across not to other nature-minded people like yourself but to kangaroo-shooting, meat-eating, leather-wearing men like me. You find a joey in a pouch, you save it; I find one in an animal I’ve shot and I toss it in the bush to die. You have to stand in my shoes and make me see things differently. You haven’t achieved that yet with this draft. I didn’t shed a tear.’

I saw my relationship to Freddy in a different light. He ruffled my feathers, but it made me stronger. ‘What do you suggest?’ I asked him. I was ready to do whatever it took to make my script work. I knew that if I did not listen to Freddy’s advice, the picture—even if made—would be ridiculed and forgotten.

Freddy took a puff of his cigar and blew a smoke ring in the air before answering. ‘What you have to do is make your main character see the world as most people do, then have something happen that changes that perception. Why should she care about some animal’s life when she has concerns enough in her own? What’s important to her is how she looks and how she is perceived. Is she fashionable enough? If millions of animals are being killed each day, what does it matter if she harms just one?’

I tried to put myself in the position that Freddy was describing. I had been a vegetarian for so many years now that it was difficult for me to see the moral difference between killing an animal and killing a person. But church ministers, loving mothers, policemen and schoolteachers killed and ate animals every day. It was the heartstrings of the indifferent I had to reach, and I was not sure how I could do that.

‘You need to plot nature calling out to this heroine long before the possum gets hit,’ Freddy explained. ‘Perhaps she goes on a hunt with her friends and sees a mother fox and her cubs ripped apart by dogs. Maybe she has to turn away—or feels compelled to look. You have to plant these things from the beginning of the story.’

When Freddy saw that I was absorbing his words, he turned to the next flaw in the script.

‘Why does the story have to be set on the south coast?’ he asked Hugh.

‘The scenery is lush,’ Hugh said. ‘The way this picture will look is important.’

I suddenly was not sure why it had to be set down south, apart from the fact that I was living there when I wrote the script.

‘No more lush than you’ll find in Ku-ring-gai Chase, which is closer. If we go south we’ll have to accommodate the whole cast there. And, if they work in the theatre, we’ll have to pay them for missing a season. If we film in Sydney they can still work at the theatre in the evenings.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ Hugh said.

It was my turn next. ‘Adela, you mentioned in your letter that it would be necessary to use Waverley Film Studios for the indoor sets. Was there any particular reason?’

I had never forgotten the premiere of
The Ghost of Spooky Hill
and the way the curtains on the set constantly moved in the breeze and how the actors’ hair became more windblown as a scene progressed.

‘I don’t want to shoot interior scenes on an exterior set,’ I said. ‘Even if it means we have to pay for klieg lights.’

‘Wanting klieg lights is understandable,’ said Freddy. ‘After all, if we want to get this film sold overseas we can’t have the technical standards laughed at. But why do we have to build sets in a studio? Surely if it’s a socialite’s house we’re trying to evoke, we can find someone to lend us their home for the day in return for a location fee. Why don’t I ask Robert if we can use his place?’

I was exhausted. But I was excited too.
In the Dark
was not going to be some two-bit production. Hugh actually smiled when Freddy told him that we were going to buy a new Bell & Howell camera.

‘Thank you,’ I said to Freddy when the meeting was over. ‘I am looking forward to working with you.’ I was surprised to find that I meant it.

He pointed to the scarf around my neck. ‘Beautiful fabric. Silk?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, fingering the scarf Mother had given me.

‘Silk indeed,’ said Freddy, an amused expression on his face. ‘Any idea how it’s made?’

I had thought my hard work was over when I had finished my script, but it was only beginning. To find the answer to Freddy’s question about my scarf, I asked Uncle Ota how silk was made and was appalled to learn that silkworms were boiled alive to obtain minute amounts of cloth.

It was something of a shock to me to realise that I could be just as indifferent and uncaring about another creature’s suffering as people who ate meat. How could I judge them when I found myself justifying that silkworms were only insects that did not feel anything, and if they were not killed for silk they would be eaten by birds anyway. But inside I knew I was making rationalisations to defend one thing: I did not want to give up my beautiful scarf. I looked pretty in it. Freddy, in his perceptive way, had given me an insight into how women justified their fur coats.

A picture that did not touch people’s hearts was a pointless one to make. Freddy told Robert what I was doing and he invited me to meet a friend of his mother’s who had formed a group to discourage women from buying hats with lyrebird feathers.

‘When I was growing up, those beautiful birds were everywhere,’ the woman told me. ‘My grandchildren may never see one.’

The woman gave me the idea of questioning the other patrons at the Vegetarian Cafe. What motivations did they have for not harming animals? ‘Why did you stop eating meat?’ I asked.

Many of them said it was because they believed eating flesh caused all sorts of diseases. Most, however, spoke of ‘the rights of animals’. One man told me that he grew up on a farm where he’d had a pet piglet. When the pig became a sow she was sent off to the butcher. ‘Molly looked into my eyes when they loaded her on the cart. She knew what was going to happen to her. I had betrayed my childhood friend.’

I spent hours in the State Library, poring over parliamentary notes on the bills that had been passed to protect wildlife and the arguments against them:
I entertain no sort of doubt that instead of bringing in a bill to protect native animals it would have been far better in the interests of the settlers generally to bring in a bill to exterminate the whole lot of them.
The farmers of the coastal districts where I had found Angel demanded that possums be systematically eradicated:
They are not only a nuisance about gardens but they get underneath the iron roofs
. But every so often a voice would speak up in defence of the ‘useless brutes’:
This bill has not been submitted for the protection of native animals, or in order to prevent their extinction, but to foster and keep up the trade in skins.
I found letters to editors written by members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia that touched my heart:
It’s a wicked thing to shoot such beautiful animals. We must take pride in our unique fauna if we are to have any sort of pride in our unique nation and not send them to the brink of extinction. We must educate our children to love and cherish these creatures as they should love and cherish this country.
I began to see that I was not so alone in my thinking, although like-minded individuals were in the minority.
What is the use of these animals?
one letter said.
They are of no use…I hope any bill to protect them will be thrown out because they are a nuisance.

Despite my bond with Angel, I changed the animal in my script from a possum to a native bear. The message was more important than the species. Possums were accused of all sorts of crimes against crops while native bears were seen as benign. They looked like people too, I thought, with their flat facial features. Lying back with its arms and legs spread out, a native bear almost resembled a child.

Imelda, the beautiful artist’s model at the cafe, turned out to be called Mabel. She gave me some invaluable insight.

‘I’ve been a vegetarian nearly all my life,’ she told me. ‘I would never harm an animal.’

When I asked her why, she lifted her skirt and pulled off her boot. Half her foot was missing. ‘I was going to be a dancer but no chance of that after what happened. When the artists paint me they drape satin over my feet.’

I stared at the injury, expecting a story about a shark bite.

‘I was seven years old when I put my foot in a steel-jaw trap. My father used them to catch rabbits and foxes but half the time we got wallabies and roos. I’d been having a fantasy about fairies living up on the mountain so I’d snuck out of the house when my sisters weren’t watching. It was two days before they found me, not having expected me to have gone so far. They dredged the dams and searched the wells, but I was up there on the mountain in agony, burning in the sun during the day and freezing during the cold, lonely night. My struggles to relieve the pain broke my bones and tore open my flesh. When they found me I was covered in bulldog ants.’

The image of a little girl with her foot shattered in a trap left me speechless. Mabel looked me in the eye. ‘I know the crushing grip of those traps, the ravens circling overhead ready to peck out my eyes. Who could subject an animal to that?’

I went home that day knowing what I had to do with my script. The leading lady was not going to tell her fiance to stop when they hit the native bear with their car. She was not going to pick it up and wrap it in her expensive fur coat. Klara might have done something like that, but the average woman would no sooner think to help the bear than she would to nurse a sick rat. The woman would have a flicker of conscience but nothing more. Then one night after she has a fight with her fiance she walks away from him. Down the road she is run over by a carload of drunk party-goers. They stop for a moment to see what they have struck. The woman cries out for help, but when they see a person lying on the road, they get back in their car and drive on, frightened of the consequences. The woman is left on the road all night with only her fur coat for comfort. As she lies there she remembers the native bear in its agony throes.

I sent the new script to Freddy. He arrived the following day at our house. ‘Now we’re talking,’ he said with a grin. ‘Now we have something powerful. It will either soar or sink. Let’s see which one.’

Once the script was ready we auditioned actors. Hugh and I did the first rounds and Freddy joined us for the final selection. The auditions took place in Freddy’s drawing room, which was as macabre as his study. A stag’s head hung above the mantelpiece and a stuffed owl perched in the corner. But instead of being oblivious to my discomfort this time, Freddy seemed embarrassed.

‘They were my father’s,’ he said, looking at the trophies as if seeing them for the first time. ‘He was a keen hunter.’

I arrived the next day prepared to ask Freddy if we could move to another room, but the stag and owl were gone. In their place were a tasteful still life and a watercolour painting of a rosella.

‘They are beautiful,’ I told Freddy.

He tugged his collar and smiled. ‘We are influencing each other.’

The two actors we chose to play the male leads, Andy Dale and Don Stanford, had been on stage since they were children. The role of our female lead proved more difficult to fill. We auditioned actresses and models before settling on a ballet dancer named Dolly Blackwood. Rather than mouth lines and pull faces, Dolly walked about touching things: running her finger along the marble fireplace; stroking the chairs; gazing at her reflection in a mirror. There was something mysterious about her that was right for the part. Freddy described her as ‘an Australian Louise Brooks’.

During the first day of rehearsals, Hugh filmed some of the key scenes. When we viewed the rushes the following morning my blood turned cold. Dolly was luminescent but Dale and Don were grotesque. Everything about them was out of proportion and twisted. We tried again the following day, but the result was the same.

I woke up that night unable to breathe. What made you think you could direct a film? I asked myself. My only experience at being a director was finishing off Peter’s half-hearted attempt at a picture and directing my family in
The Bunyip
. This time I had two famous names in my production and finance from not only Freddy but investors such as Farmer’s department store. I thought of the disaster looming when everyone realised that I did not know what I was doing. Then I remembered Aunt Josephine’s faith in me and decided to act like a professional, and not like a child bursting into tears at the first sign of difficulty.

I wrote to Raymond Longford, who Mr Tilly had put me in touch with when I first became interested in making pictures. I told him that I admired his work and asked if he would meet with me and give me some advice on film technique. I waited for a reply, but nothing came. I grew desperate and lost more sleep. Then two days before we were scheduled to start filming, I received a note from him inviting me to afternoon tea.