Rose Boys Read online

  PETER ROSE was born in 1955 and raised in Wangaratta, in northern Victoria. His father was a legendary player for, and later coach of, the Collingwood Football Club. His older brother also played for Collingwood, and opened the batting for the Victorian state cricket team.

  After graduating from Monash University, Rose became a bookseller and eventually began working in publishing. His first book of poetry, The House of Vitriol, appeared in 1990.

  Throughout the 1990s Rose was a publisher at Oxford University Press in Melbourne. During this time he produced two more volumes of poetry: The Catullan Rag (1993) and Donatello in Wangaratta (1998).

  In 2001, two years after his brother’s death, he published Rose Boys. Critically acclaimed and the winner of the 2003 National Biography Award, the memoir became a bestseller.

  Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems and A Case of Knives, Rose’s first novel, were published in 2005. Roddy Parr, another novel, followed in 2010. His fifth collection of poetry, Crimson Crop, won a 2012 Queensland Literary Award.

  Peter Rose has edited two poetry anthologies and his literary journalism has appeared in many publications. Since 2001 he has been the editor of Australian Book Review.

  BRIAN MATTHEWS has been a weekly columnist for the Weekend Australian Magazine. Louisa, a life of Louisa Lawson, won the 1987 ALS Gold Medal; A Fine and Private Place, a memoir, won the inaugural Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction; and Manning Clark: A Life won the 2010 National Biography Award.

  ALSO BY PETER ROSE

  Fiction

  A Case of Knives

  Roddy Parr

  Poetry

  The House of Vitriol

  The Catullan Rag

  Donatello in Wangaratta

  Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems

  Crimson Crop

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Peter Rose 2001

  Introduction copyright © Brian Matthews 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Allen & Unwin 2001

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147202

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148278

  Author: Rose, Peter, 1955–

  Title: Rose boys / by Peter Rose; introduced by Brian Matthews.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: 796.358092

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Extreme Days

  by Brian Matthews

  Rose Boys

  Acknowledgements

  1. Scrapbooks

  2. St Valentine’s Day

  3. Rambling Rose

  4. Ward Seven

  5. Scoop

  6. The Bunker

  7. Yarra Me

  8. Intensive Care

  9. The Banner

  ROSE Boys begins on 22 August 2000 in ‘an upstairs study in Adelaide’, not far from St Peter’s Cathedral, where for the moment the bells are ‘blessedly still’. Further down the road from St Peter’s, and in sound of the bells when they are in full voice, is the Adelaide Oval, perhaps the most beautiful of Australia’s cricket grounds, and the venue for a Sheffield Shield match between South Australia and Victoria in January 1973. Forced to follow on after being 205 runs behind on the first innings, Victoria was rescued by an opening partnership of 217 between Paul Sheahan and Robert Rose, who batted for five hours to make a ‘dogged’ 94.

  Reading through family records in the silence of that upstairs study, Peter Rose relives scenes from his boyhood with his brother, Robert, and their parents, Elsie and Bob (one of Collingwood’s greatest footballers); but it seems there is no escaping a truth that is as insistent as the cathedral bells when the hour turns. Too quickly, brutally, a random choice opens his brother’s scrapbook ‘at a front-page story drawn from the Melbourne Herald of 15 February 1974’—‘ROSE PARALYSED IN CAR ROLL’, runs the headline. The Australian that same day is unequivocal: ‘CRICKET, FOOTBALL STAR IS PARALYSED’.

  No matter what diversions the scrapbook turns up—a riotous wake after the Magpies’ legendary 1970 Grand Final defeat; the moods of coach Jock McHale; Bob and Elsie’s courtship and marriage; flashing scenes of young Robert, the brilliant batsman and mercurial footballer—the merciless narrative to which Peter Rose has tentatively, fearfully committed himself will out. About to turn away from the scrapbook’s intolerable reminders, the pasted-in clipping about the ‘transformation’ wrought by ‘a driving accident—just another of our crashes—and a second or two in time’, Rose is brought back into the unremitting penumbra of memory, the unreachable silence of the dead and, above all, the unanswered questions the dead leave in their wake.

  And so the first chapter, ‘Scrapbooks’, a skirmishing with the past—now intense and tight-lipped, now genial and indulgent—becomes a magnificent prelude to confronting again the pain that awaited the Rose boys and all their family when Robert’s Volkswagen spun off the road near Bacchus Marsh on St Valentine’s Day in 1974.

  What exactly is the message of Robert Rose? One year after his death, twenty-six years after just another of our crashes, knowing the effect it had on his family and friends, and thousands of others who hardly knew him, I want to go back there, I want to examine my brother’s life and reanimate him…Here, in my Adelaide eyrie, with my documents and my pent cathedral bells, I want to examine his achievement, what he symbolised, what he gave and what he withheld, what he divulged and what he never said, as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a mate, above all as a tragic victim of that ‘second or two in time’.

  And so I hold on to the outsize scrapbook for a while longer. It is time to listen to my brother whose message, laconic but self-evident to many in his life, I somehow never fully heeded…

  Again I turn to the handsome lad, the vaunted youth, the rage recruit, and will him to speak to me.

  Like all fine, evocative prose, Rose’s splendid re-creation of the place and mood in which he set out on his memoir journey has echoes of, and is intensified by, other voices seeking the same truths: his fellow poet Kenneth Slessor, for example, who, willing the dead to speak to him, hears only ‘five bells coldly ringing out…the bumpkin calculus of Time’.

  Rose Boys is the story of Robert Rose’s transformation from a quintessentially Australian sporting life of brilliance, promise and sheer physical energy to the confined and cribbed world of the quadriplegic. More broadly, it is the wrenching account of a family living for a quarter of a century in the sometimes tightening, sometimes loosening, never absent grip of catastrophe.

  The book begins unannounced, in a brief prologue that moves with the pace and fractured logic of a dream: ‘Electric afternoon. Hiding from humanity, I drift through burnt spears and withered grass. My walk is soothing but fraught with snakes and goannas. They rustle in the flammable scrub, reminding me that anything can happen to a solitary. In the distance a minor cemetery catches the sun…A woman appears, frantic and dishevelled…’

  The prologue ends inconclusively, when a small boy with ‘uncanny vision’ ‘takes pity’ on the wavering intruder and speaks to him. This dream—inchoate, compelling—resurfaces at the end of the book in the form of Peter Rose’s splendid poem ‘I Recognise My Brother in a Dream’. From the remorseless heat of the trials that Robert and the family had endured there issued at long last, shaped and graspable, the product of ‘seven years and thirty drafts’, a hard-won serenity, the pitilessly even-handed but reconciling equilibrium of art.

  In contrast to the disorienting dream and the richly allusive poem, the main narrative between the two is spare and tense: ‘Robert was lying on his back, looking rather beautiful. His head was shaved. They had already drilled holes in his skull and inserted calipers attached to eight-pound weights. Robert’s head was pulled back, immovable. There was a tube in his mouth. Mum kissed him. His first words to her were, “I’m in trouble.”’

  Artless on the surface—telling it how it was, you might say—this tremendously moving moment is unerringly timed from word to word, sentence to sentence, to deliver the hammer blows of disaster without breaking up under their force. Like Nick Adams in Hemingway’s story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, who keeps panic at bay with a succession of small, deliberated tasks, Peter Rose, scarcely knowing what to feel or think, controls surges of panic and grief within tight, unadorned prose. It was just about the only way he could write it.

  Rose Boys is relentless: when you think it can’t get worse for Peter and his parents and their circle, it does. When you think Robert can suffer no more, that torture upon torture must kill him, he endures, suffering before the gaze of his loyal, loving, helpless family. The telling of this story is so right that it is easy to overlook the nature of the task Rose set himself. No feelings are spared here—not the
reader’s, not his own—least of all his own.

  The book’s trajectory is a descent that ravages and cauterises the Roses, strong though they are, and threatens all bulwarks, structures and props. Disintegration flickers through the story with increasing certainty, and that sense of pervasive illness which afflicts tragic households becomes a sub-theme in Rose’s memoir. ‘The extreme days had begun,’ he writes in his journal, ‘days of futility, days of grief’, days of ‘volatile, ungovernable’ emotions. ‘No one was in good shape’ and at times, he says, conceding how graphically the image of Robert’s broken body commanded their thoughts and imaginations, ‘it felt as if we were all crippled.’

  They had been gathered into what Susan Sontag called ‘the night-side of life…a more onerous citizenship…in the kingdom of the sick’. They would return at last from this drawn-out crepuscular gloom incalculably altered, damaged, but glimpsing a hard renewal.

  For himself, Rose looks down for the last time on his brother with ‘a pang of something that would never fully dissipate—incompletion, incomprehension, rich regret…’ There seems to be no resolution available to him. Even his last-minute attempt to see the Collingwood team honour Robert is foiled by rain and confusion.

  Yet this story of fractured lives, unassuageable grief and nowhere-to-turn desperation becomes, in Rose’s hands, a triumph. Though seeming, in retrospect, unrelieved—I read it at a sitting when it was first published, in 2001, and its images and episodes ghosted round me for days—the story of Robert Rose’s tragedy is both ennobled and lightened by a context that calamity cannot diminish. Friends, children and extended family populate and colour the ‘shifting text’: Bob’s parents, Bert and Millie, with ‘one cow but no fence’; Uncle Rusty, ‘a wheat-farming bachelor with a roll-your-own cough’; and the Rose family’s Nyah West home, in Elizabeth Street, ‘named after one of the little princesses but commonly known as Blowfly Flat’.

  And there is Peter Rose himself, ironic, witty, ‘Thicko’ to his equally witty and ironic brother. His account effortlessly ranges across past and present, and is variously enriched by glimpses of Melbourne’s football culture, his emerging sexuality, his discovery of the depth of his fraternal love, his growth as a poet and his affection for Robert’s daughter, Salli.

  Through it all there is the selfless devotion of Elsie, devastated but indomitable, resilient; and Bob, a wonderful human being, unassuming, dogged, loving. And there is Robert Rose, whose inspiring courage, lost promise, shattered body and tortured soul this great book unflinchingly documents, celebrates and gently lays to rest.

  for

  Robert Rose 1952–1999

  and

  Brian Martin 1945–2000

  Living is more dangerous than anything.

  Randall Jarrell

  There is no such thing as forgetting. The secret inscriptions are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Everything is what it is, and not another thing.

  Bishop Butler

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This composite portrait of Robert was only possible because of the generosity and goodwill of the people who knew him best: our parents of course, to whom I am grateful for everything, Salli Caruana, Terry Butler and Jenny Mackay. Other people gave me helpful information: Steve Bernard, Joe Fairhurst, Kate Breadmore, Paul Sheahan, Peter Harris, Dr David Burke and Jeff Kennett.

  I am especially indebted to Robert Bird, who spoke to me freely about the accident in which he too was injured, and to the late Brian Martin, who saw me shortly before his death.

  I doubt whether this book would have been finished without the encouragement of friends and advisers, especially Sonja Chalmers, Craig Sherborne, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Louise Sweetland and Morag Fraser. Christopher Menz has been the subtlest and most supportive of critics.

  The late John Iremonger commissioned the original edition for Allen & Unwin (2001). I am also grateful to his colleagues Rebecca Kaiser and Julia Stiles, who was a thorough and sympathetic editor.

  Soon after Robert’s death his family created the Robert Rose Foundation, a bona fide charity which helps people with spinal cord injuries. Readers wanting to make donations or seeking more information about the Foundation should consult the website: www.robertrosefoundation.com.

  The quotation from Janet Malcolm is drawn from The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Papermac, 1994). Two quotations are drawn from Robert McCrum’s My Year Off: Rediscovering Life after a Stroke (Picador, 1998). Peter Porter’s poem ‘Basta Sangue’, from which I quote, appears in his Collected Poems (OUP, 1999).

  Electric afternoon. Hiding from humanity, I drift through burnt spears and withered grass. My walk is soothing but fraught with snakes and gonannas. They rustle in the flammable scrub, reminding me that anything can happen to a solitary. In the distance a minor cemetery catches the sun. I know it contains hidden ancestors. I study the stones but am defeated by hieroglyphics. Sheep ring the fence, and beyond them the Ovens—or is it the Murray River? My two rivers. A woman appears, frantic and dishevelled. I know her. She is one of the eminences in the library where I work. This acquistive god might have been conceived inside one of the reference books she guards like gold. Breathless, she tells me that a power failure has blacked out the entire region. She urges me to return to the library and describes the chaos I will find. The moribund computer is in a state of crimson riot. All the records are lost. No one can borrow or return. Midgets of literature stagger through gloomy compactuses. The chief librarian is a write-off.

  I hasten to the library down clamorous streets. It feels like a film, but then, less real than film. More fluid. The old hotel near my parents’ shop has been plausibly renamed the Jewel. Anxious women scuttle into attics clutching decorative hatboxes. Empty prams flash across the street. Oozing insects crawl into surfaces that creep like flesh. I long for the radical ceremony of scavenging birds. I am frightened and then strangely unfrightened.

  Turning into the main street I waver briefly. The library, standing between the blood bank and the football oval where all the men in my family have played, and played, is ablaze, everything in it presumably lost. Primitive flames shoot from the roof. I think of plunging my right arm into the fire. I will rescue the clueless and the knowing alike. But then firemen appear with their suggestive hoses, and the burlesque of evacuation begins. I move on, no longer misgiving.

  At the end of the street stands a two-storey block of flats. Are there really flats in our town, let alone two-storey buildings? I hadn’t noticed before. Three boys are leaning from a window decked in purple ribbons. I move towards them, studying my excited trio, not the blaze. The boy in the middle is jeering at something in the distance. He is slender and vivid and blond as an angel. His two companions stare at him open-mouthed. I almost recognise this boy, but he is younger than me, which feels wrong. He is clearly the oracle because of his uncanny vision. Creeping up to the foot of the flats, I listen to his sunny description of the pandemonium in the library—the pillage, the recriminations, the reign of blisters. He laughs at the firemen and their theatrical efforts to douse the blaze. He mocks the townsfolk who cluster behind barriers, gripping their cameras.

  And then, looking over the window ledge, he takes pity on me and addresses me directly.

  1

  SCRAPBOOKS

  August 22, 2000. In an upstairs study in Adelaide, the bells of the neighbouring cathedral blessedly still, strong coffee at the ready, I open my brother’s old scrapbook. It is just one of several I have brought with me. Curious documents: these bibles of scrap, collages of self-delight. I have never kept one myself. That would be a thin volume anyway. Perhaps my diaries, stacked in a trunk, fill that need. I will draw on them, too, as I contemplate my brother.

  I open his scrapbook at random. It parts at a front-page story drawn from the Melbourne Herald of 15 February 1974. The old gothic masthead is sallow with age but full of information. The newspaper, costing six cents, seven by air, comprises thirty-eight pages—quite puny, I think. There are no lifestyle or gourmet or computer sections to bolster it. After a long career in publishing, editing thumping dictionaries and reference books, I find thirty-eight pages innocent, pamphlet-like.