The Biographer's Lover

Acknowledgements

EDNA: A LIFE

Author’s Preface

When this biography was first published in 1994, I titled it The Forgotten War Artist. Back then, few people in Australia remembered Edna Cranmer’s work. Over the two decades that have passed since, the text that you hold in your hands has remained the same. But today Edna is far from forgotten: she is now considered one of Australia’s greatest artists. So what has changed? Not the facts.

Born in Geelong in 1929, Edna was a largely self-taught painter. After a few modest successes exhibiting in the 1960s, she briefly came to the attention of one of Australia’s most powerful artistic tastemakers: in 1967, Sir William Dargie recommended Edna be considered as a potential official war artist worthy of deployment to the Vietnam War on behalf of the Australian War Memorial. This fleeting recognition, however, failed to translate into sales or accolades, and Edna withdrew completely from the Australian art world in the early 1970s. For the last twenty years of her life, Edna dedicated herself to her family, painting in near solitude in her studio in the hills above Port Phillip Bay.

It wasn’t until after the artist’s death in 1991 that Australia began to discover her incredible body of work. Her images of ordinary Australian men and women working, fighting and commemorating the wars that defined the nation’s character during the twentieth century have now become iconic, from the vibrant oils of the Australian Women’s Land Army series to the delicate sketches of her husband Max Cranmer, who was crippled fighting on the Kokoda Track during the Second World War.

In 2006, a year in which only three per cent of works auctioned globally were painted by women, Edna’s soaring Poppies triptych of the Australian war cemeteries in France sold to an anonymous collector for $1.25 million. Edna Cranmer’s work has finally found its audience. We now remember Edna as an unofficial war artist, as an emblem of Australian womanhood and the Anzac spirit of hard work, sisterhood, motherhood and loyalty. We can only speculate how that would make the artist herself feel. I, of course, hope she would be pleased.

As always, I would like to thank Percy and Victoria Cranmer and the extended Cranmer and Whitedale families for their support. Without them, it would have been impossible to tell this story. The family’s insistence that I continue to be Edna’s sole official biographer is a great honour; I know that others will eventually come but, in the meantime, I owe the family – and Edna herself – a great debt that I can never repay.

This re-release of The Forgotten War Artist: Edna, A Life with new colour plates and photos from the family’s collection was supported by the Australian War Memorial and the National Endowment for Memory, a federal initiative for the preservation of Australia’s war histories.

The Biographer

Edna had been dead for seven months on the day I first heard her name, her body in a box in the wet dirt on the peninsula.

It was April 1992, and I was sitting in a Carlton cafe with my agent, Anna-Marie, talking next projects. I was twenty-nine years old, divorced three years, the author of a handful of books, none of which bore my name on the cover. Rose Gardening for Beginners. Atkins on the Menu: Low-Carb Recipes from 10 Great Australian Chefs. Art Now: Unlock Your Inner Painter. 16 Tricks with Scarves. Everyday Angels: How to Find Calm in Your Home. A ghostwriter.

The coffee was burned, the air sharp, and Anna-Marie left plump, tan lipstick marks around the tips of her Benson & Hedges Special Filters. Her fingernails were permanently painted a stubborn rococo pink. The men at the table next to us were eating marinara and picking at the greasy prawn carcasses. One of those end-of-summer storms had just blown through. Huge leaves spiralled down from the plane trees and clogged the Melbourne gutters.

‘I’ve got you a project,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Edna Cranmer. Died last year. Daughter’s grieving, wants to do some sort of biographical monograph. It’s a vanity project, but there’s potential for it to be more if you can get the woman’s son involved too.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s a footy player. Cranno.’

‘Cranno. Geelong Cats?’

‘I didn’t think you were the footy type.’

‘I grew up there.’

‘No? You’re from Geelong?’

‘It’s only an hour away.’

‘Know any Cranmers?’

‘I’ve been gone a long time. Geelong’s bigger than you think.’

Anna-Marie puckered her mouth as if she could taste oil in her latte. ‘Doesn’t matter. Could be a footy memoir. People love a good football origin story. Sounds like you know football.’

‘Not really.’

‘Look, this could go two ways. Option one: you do it arty. Three months, flat fee, short monograph, and daughter self-publishes under her own name. Five people buy it – the rest she gives away as presents. Family’s loaded, and there’s not much to tell. Daughter says her mum stopped exhibiting to dedicate her life to the family, but probably mum just couldn’t make it.’ Anna-Marie stubbed out her cigarette, wrapped her creamy scarf closer around her shoulders and shivered. ‘Dropped out, taught local ladies to paint piers and seagulls. You do have some sort of art degree, right? Victoria said the art degree was important to her.’

‘Victoria?’

‘The daughter.’

‘I have a Masters in art history. On the French surrealists, Anna-Marie. Not the Australian suburbs.’

‘It’s all spiky irons and toilet seats to me. Option one: arty vanity project. Option two: persuade the football player son to talk, weave the art stuff in and then sell it as a footy memoir under your own name.’

‘Wouldn’t that annoy the daughter?’

‘I don’t know. Find out. Most important thing is that the daughter says the family’s tight and they’re all on board. No hang-ups, no delays. You just get in there and see if you can change their minds. Footy memoir. That could start something for you.’

I remember telling myself to be pleased.

I was not. A hunger was starting to grow inside me. I wanted more.

Anna-Marie worked from home, a lacy white terrace house in St Kilda. I thought of her as my ‘agent’, but she rarely took a cut of the projects she threw my way. I think she wanted to be my mentor. I certainly wanted her to be. But we were an odd couple. She was too busy to ever really look out for me; she threw me scraps. I was too proud to ask for what I wanted.

When I arrived for the meeting with the daughter and her lawyer a couple of days later, Anna-Marie was waiting for me on the nature strip. She began talking as soon as I opened the car door.

‘I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to warn you …’

But a slick silver BMW was pulling up behind me, scraping the kerb. The daughter had arrived. She got out of the car in one smooth movement.

Victoria Cranmer was powerful, like a machine, legs in bright white leggings, long business jacket grazing her thighs. Her thick blonde hair was short and winged. Princess Diana was all over the magazines that year, but Princess Diana was wispy, unsure; Victoria was solid, concrete. Chanel and dry-cleaning. Around my own age, she had the beginnings of the weathered Australian skin I have always associated with women who used to be beautiful in their teens.

Behind Victoria, the family’s lawyer, Leslie Clarke, was not so much dressed as draped with nondescript fabric.

Anna-Marie ushered us into her house, where we perched on the fluffy couches, facing each other over a porcelain bowl of potpourri. She opened the meeting by saying how much she liked the idea of me ghostwriting Edna’s monograph, but that she had reservations about how long the project might take.

Ignoring my agent, Victoria leaned over and took my hand.

‘They tell me you grew up in Geelong?’ Her touch was smooth and warm. Her fingernails were very short, perfectly manicured. Hands that were used to holding a horse’s reins, to swinging golf clubs on lush greens. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Matthew Flinders,’ I told her, skin tingling.

‘You won’t believe this. Mum went there. That was her high school. She was in the first class ever, right when it opened.’

Victoria let go of my hand, raised thin eyebrows.

‘But you didn’t go there,’ I said.

Victoria wrinkled her nose in faux embarrassment. ‘Geelong Grammar.’

The most expensive private school in the country. Girls from my school had thrown bottles at girls from her school. Girls from her school had told stories about how we were sluts, and junkies, and whores.

Anna-Marie was already glancing at her watch. ‘There’s a limited market,’ she interjected, trying to reclaim the conversation. ‘A limited audience for women’s lives. Academics, those sorts of people.’

Victoria shook her head. ‘I think you’re wrong. This is the ’90s. It’s time to write real women’s stories. Which is exactly why someone needs to write about Mum. She was in the Land Army, she travelled, she was tough. And then there’s Mum’s art. It’s so good. She could have been famous, but she didn’t care about all that attention. She stopped exhibiting when we were kids so that she could focus on us. She sacrificed her art for her family. She was that sort of woman. And it’s going to be easy to write about her. I’ve already started collecting all the material.’

‘Leslie called me this morning to explain about the embargo on your mother’s written correspondence,’ said Anna-Marie, looking at the lawyer. ‘That’s slightly unusual, so I just want to make sure that you have everything ready before we set a timeline and a cost for the project, Victoria.’

This was what Anna-Marie had wanted to tell me.

‘Exactly.’ Victoria was still bright and smiling. ‘That’s why we’re here. To talk this through.’

Anna-Marie was shaking her head. ‘When you first came to me,’ she said, ‘you told me you had everything together, all the materials and the correspondence, that you’d built out all the timelines, and that everyone in the family was excited to help out. That’s why I suggested three months. It’s starting to sound like a bigger project.’

‘The terms of the will were clear, Victoria,’ said Leslie. ‘You have the sketchbooks. You have all the paintings except for what was left to John. But all Edna’s letters, those are embargoed. You can’t go digging through her papers for this.’

‘This John, he’s another brother, right?’ asked Anna-Marie. ‘And he has some say in the estate too? You wanted a lot of images reproduced. Even with small projects, this can end up in the courts when people disagree. We wouldn’t want that.’

Victoria slammed the flat of her hand on the table. ‘Oh, please,’ she snapped. ‘John’s not a real relative. He doesn’t care – he didn’t even send a card for the funeral. I am the executor of Mum’s estate. I know what Mum would have wanted.’

She turned to me.

‘Please,’ she repeated. Her voice shifted, lowering, as if we were friends, telling secrets under the covers. The woman who had slapped the table a second before was gone. ‘You can use everything I have. Mum’s sketchbooks are better than anything she ever wrote down. The sketchbooks are mine. The paintings are basically all mine. We won’t need any letters. Granny can’t wait to talk to you. My aunts. Percy will talk to you, my dad will talk to you. You’ll have everything you need. I’d write it myself but it would take so long, I’m just not a writer. I need your help. It will be easy, though; I’ll make it easy for you.’

All three of the women turned towards me.

‘I’ll look at the paintings,’ I said. ‘But I can’t promise anything.’

Victoria clapped her hands together once. The sound was startling in the soft white room. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Great.’

When Victoria and Leslie were gone, Anna-Marie and I stood on the footpath while she lit a cigarette. The wind swept up the street, racing through the picket fences, making the end of her smoke flare red.

‘You better get Cranno on board and make this a footy memoir,’ she told me. ‘That embargo? The lawyer said this morning that it’s in place until the husband, Max, dies, and the kids too. It doesn’t feel right. If the family gets hostile, you drop it.’

‘Could be interesting though,’ I said.

‘You don’t want interesting. And you don’t want to get caught in the middle of a family fight about a no-one, writing a book that only they’ll read. This isn’t Plath. Put your time into something worthwhile, okay?’

‘Another self-help guide?’

‘I’m telling you: I’m losing my good feelings about this. Make it quick, or just say no.’

‘Anna-Marie, I’m not going to do this if it doesn’t make sense.’

I have seen the lawyer Leslie many times in the two decades that have passed since the biography was first published. At galleries, at writers’ festivals. I have tried to speak to her. But she avoids me.

My son Immy was born just before the biography was released. As Edna’s fame grew and the book began to sell faster and faster, I would take Immy to events, setting him down in his carrier in the corner of the room, or later at the edge of the stage. Once, at a panel at the State Library in Melbourne, I saw Leslie staring down into his carrier, as if she was trying to work out where he came from. She disappeared into the crowd before I could get back to him.

They had been close, Edna and Leslie, towards the end. There are drawings of Leslie in some of Edna’s last sketchbooks. Leslie sitting on a bench in Sorrento, looking into the distance as the ferry pulls away. Leslie asleep at the desk in Edna’s studio, her mouth partly open, head resting on her arms.

I have often wondered how much Edna told Leslie, and how much Leslie read without permission. She had access to Edna’s papers. In the years before they were moved to the National Gallery of Australia, Leslie kept the boxes in her own storage unit. She could have snuck into them, gone rifling through her friend’s life.

Mostly, though, I wonder what Edna would think of us. Of me.

Before cancer got Anna-Marie, I told her what we’d done, Percy and I. She was bald that day, surrounded by blooming and wilting flowers, all of them with sharp little calling cards wedged into their petals. Her room smelled strongly of disinfectant, bodies and plants slowly going bad.

‘You think I can help you now?’ she said, twitching in her bed. ‘That book made your career, and one day it’s going to bring it all down again. I told you not to get so involved with that damned family.’

After the visit, I sat for a long time in the drought-scorched Treasury Gardens, staring up at the window of the room where I thought Anna-Marie lay.

EDNA: A LIFE

Edna Frances Whitedale was born on 24 October 1929 into the westerly backblocks of Geelong, an industrial town of wool princes and workers, superphosphate and factories. As a child, she lay under the clacking Jacquard looms of the Black Swan Carpets factory, watching the coloured threads spin through the shuttles, weaving tight, intricate patterns for the upper-class families of Geelong and beyond.

She was the second and final child of Margaret and Frank Whitedale, a family struggling on the edge of the working class. Both Margaret and Frank were cogs in the wheels of the town’s industrial wool empire. Her father, known in the town as the responsible family man in an otherwise ‘bad’ Whitedale bunch, was the factory floor manager at Black Swan Carpets. Edna’s mother, Frank’s French ‘war bride’, worked as a secretary in the factory’s office.

By 1929, Edna was long-awaited. Over the ten years that had passed since Margaret gave birth to Edna’s older sister Imelda, Margaret had endured a number of miscarriages. For her, the loss of each child was momentous. She was trying to belong, trying to prove her worth to her husband’s demanding family in an Australia that would soon be calling for its citizens to ‘populate or perish’. The government’s slogan was apt: it was indeed a dangerous time to be a mother. Birth was a treacherous business, with maternal deaths on the rise in the 1920s and 1930s. More and more women were being treated in hospitals and put under the care of doctors who, as often as not, knew less about birth than the women themselves. But the Whitedales were desperate, and they scrimped and saved for Margaret to get a bed in the newly opened maternal wing of the Geelong Kitchener Memorial Hospital.

Edna herself would probably not have approved of anyone reading too much significance into her date of birth. The keen eye she shows in her work suggests that she did not break time up into discrete packages: she saw events as playing out over years, in memory, in repeat. The social position that defined her family did not begin with her birth. It had been building for decades. But it’s a fact that Edna was born on the eve of a crisis, and in hindsight the coincidence is at risk of seeming poetic. The American economy was faltering – in days it would collapse. The rest of the world would be dragged down with it.

In Geelong, the Whitedales were distracted. For them, Edna was a miracle child, and she took up all the air in the room. Even as Australia endured the Great Depression that defined her childhood, Edna spent her earliest years feeling that she was protected, special; her older sister, Imelda, would make sure she was both.

The Biographer

On the day I first went to visit Edna’s studio and met her widower, Max, great gusts of late autumn clouds blew over the highway. The drive from the city to the seaside resort town of Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula follows a thin string of empty beaches that unfurl towards the craggy rocks of the point. The Ford Falcon roared under me. Hard rain spattered on its windshield. I listened to the endless talk of dingoes and babies on the radio and kept one hand pressed over the heat vent.

Edna Cranmer grew up on my peninsula, on the Bellarine, with its pockmarked marshes and factories, bays within bays, the smell of sewerage, salt, smelters, sheep, woodchips and bird shit. But she grew old on the Mornington side of the bay: a straight coastal road skirting the water lined with stately white limestone hotels.

Now I can see they are both beautiful peninsulas, even stripped of their she-oak forests and bushlands. But back then, I liked to think that their names revealed the character of their residents: on my side, the Bellarine still held the faint echo of the past, for all we tried to ignore it. Balla Wein, from the Wadawurrung. Where we lean on our elbow (balla) beside the fire (wein), looking out at the sparkling sea.

The Mornington Peninsula had been named after some fancy colonial earl.

That day I wound through the narrow streets above Sorrento in the rain, checking the numbers on the letterboxes. Infinity pools dappled with raindrops flickered between the houses. Inching down Max Cranmer’s driveway, I thought the Falcon would lose its grip on the slick paving stones and plunge towards the cliffs.

Victoria was supposed to meet me there. The only other car in the steep driveway was a shiny silver BMW. I peered through its window, but it wasn’t her car; the metal drive shaft had been modified, and a disabled permit swung from the rear-view mirror.

I paused on the dark verandah, gathering myself. A well-oiled axe was propped against a neatly stacked pile of wood.

Edna’s widower opened the door before I had time to knock. Max Cranmer was bent over, a question mark silhouetted against the soft green light that poured out of the house, a light I would later recognise in Edna’s work from the late 1970s and early 1980s. I put out my hand automatically to shake his. Then I registered that he couldn’t – saw the polished-wood walking sticks he was using to support himself, his crippled legs.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pinwheeling his fingers around the silky handles of the walking sticks. ‘Old wounds. You lead the way to the car, I’ll give the directions.’

‘Edna’s studio isn’t here?’

‘Up the road a few blocks. She wanted the feeling of being out of the house. The walk.’

‘Should we wait for Victoria?’

‘Nah, it’s fine, it’s fine. I’ll come with you. Vicky called. She missed the Queenscliff ferry. It’s Sunday, so the next one won’t be for a few hours. We wait for her and we’ll be here all day. And I have a meeting at two. Can’t do that.’

I heard his sticks hitting the paving stones as we went back to the Falcon. I opened the passenger door for him as if I was a taxi driver.

‘Beautiful,’ he said, running his dark eyes over the car admiringly.

‘My dad worked for Ford,’ I said, which wasn’t an explanation.

‘Eddy painted a picture of a ceremony at Ford in the ’50s,’ Max said. ‘It was an okay one, that painting. Think she sold it to the factory owner.’

He leaned against the Falcon’s roof, lowering himself in stages into the passenger seat, then pulling the rest of his body along. As I reversed up the steep drive he touched the car’s upholstery, admired its finishes. Told me I’d taken good care of it.

I had. The Falcon was my folly. I’d bought it on the day I finished high school, when I was eighteen. Years after