There seemed no way for me to broach the subject with the male musicians. Try as I might to psych myself into walking up to one of the guys between sets and asking them about their compositions or how to get better at improvisation, I never could. Desperate to know their secrets, I listened at home for hours to their recordings, poring over liner notes like sacred texts. But at live gigs I was too self-conscious, obsessing over whether the musicians recognised me from my frequent attendance—and if they did, worrying that they thought I was a groupie looking for a date. I couldn’t bear being thought of as a groupie even though I would have jumped at the chance of a date. Sex was the invisible and ubiquitous barrier to communication.
I submitted reviews of jazz gigs to the student newspaper, Honi Soit, and got a small buzz from seeing my name in print. If I couldn’t be on stage, I thought, I could at least write about what I heard. For a time I co-presented a jazz show on campus radio with my new friend David, a Law student whose taste in jazz, as conservative as the rest of him, stopped at the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally.
In her 2007 memoir The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw wrote, ‘I knew there were those for whom music was soundtrack and those of us for whom it was, well, music, but didn’t notice that most of those who took it seriously were boys.’ My fascination with live jazz was as all-consuming as a love affair. Sublimation was the sincerest form of flattery—I needed regular live performances as other girls my age needed sex.
I was not having sex with David. I was not interested in having sex with David. We enjoyed the sort of rapid-fire witty banter that young people too easily mistake for intimacy. The only men who really interested me were on stage, where they safely stayed and from where I could fantasise freely about our future together.
At nineteen, David already had the economic privilege and the testosterone to regard as inevitable a woman’s hope to hitch her wagon to his breed of horse: private school education, budding lawyer, white. David and his classmates had gone from the elite Sydney Grammar School to the dorm rooms of St Paul’s College in the collective movement of a school of fish. Having chosen to become lawyers and accountants like their fathers, they followed a career path as well signposted as a tourist trail. One hundred years after Banjo Paterson left Sydney Grammar to study Law, his fellow alumni were still becoming lawyers, if no longer writing poetry. Perhaps the loss of poetry reflected the process of sexual selection. David’s professional future—which to him must have appeared linear as he walked those early qualifying steps along it—formed, when viewed from the distance of hindsight, a perfect circle.
‘Career! That is all girls think of now, instead of being good wives and mothers and attending to their homes and doing what God intended,’ rails Sybylla Melvyn’s grandmother at the very mention of the C-word in My Brilliant Career. ‘All they think of is gadding about and being fast, and ruining themselves body and soul.’
I would have loved to ruin myself body and soul, but in my first two years on campus there were no takers. At least none who interested me. For a long time it didn’t occur to me that I kept people at arm’s length: about the distance between a pianist and her instrument.
David laughed when I explained that I couldn’t imagine ever marrying or having children. ‘But you’re studying for the marriage degree,’ he teased about my poor-cousin qualification, the Bachelor of Arts. On some fundamental level, David was relieved to know his Law degree would grant him a vocational qualification, if not a sense of vocation. Perhaps what I really meant was that I would never marry him.
‘You’d be a terrible mother anyway,’ David said. This casual line stung me more in practice than it should have in theory, but I felt proud to confuse him.
Being single sounded just fine to me as long as I could find the roadmap that would show me what to do with my life. But I felt no closer to finding that map. Whether or not a young woman had marriage on her mind, at the close of the twentieth century, the Bachelor of Arts had become the contemporary equivalent of piano lessons.
25
ALICE MAY MORRISON TAYLOR’S PASSPORT, WHICH she presented on 25 August 1921 in order to embark the SS Berrima, lists the features of her 26-year-old face in a less-than-flattering light. Forehead—square. Eyes: hazel. Nose: small. Mouth: medium. Chin: small. Colour of hair: dark. Complexion: ruddy. Face: round. Next to the final item, Any special peculiarities, a short dash indicates there was nothing to add. What did my grandmother make of that dash? That there was nothing special about her, nothing to distinguish her round ruddy face from those of other women boarding a ship to the other side of the world? Experience had curdled the milky complexion of her schoolgirl portrait. Perhaps she felt the dash was appropriate. She most likely preferred to keep her peculiarity to herself: that dash was as conspicuous a silence as a period of rest marked on a music score.
Like Alice May Morrison Taylor herself, the SS Berrima was a product of the working classes of Glasgow. The workers of Caird & Co. at Greenock
