A Personal Touch

Elisabeth Murdoch, Two Lives.
by John Monks
MacMillan, Australia

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch speaks of her "two lives".  The first is of youth:  prior to her marriage to Keith Murdoch and their years together.  The second is of age, following his death in 1952.  In this she is far too modest.  She was no ordinary girl, nor wife, nor widow.  In actuality, there have been many "lives", and the biography, by John Monks, provides a splendid introduction to them and to her.  She is gardener, traveller, patroness — and matriarch of a remarkable and far-flung clan.  She is friend to many, a famed (and witty) conversationalist, and in her many years of public service has given to Melbourne, her own city, more than most of us would be able to give in the course of a dozen lifetimes.

At the age of 85 she might well have become an author, but was sensible, I think, to allow John Monks to interpret, following the clues as it were, through hours of conversation.  The alternative, a narrative (like that of her great friend Joan Lindsay in Time without Clocks) would have been worth the reading, but conversation seems very much her own natural medium.  It is in the far-reaching talk -- of gardening, family and friendships — that we learn the most about her and much else beside.  More than once she speaks of "the personal touch", a quality she found throughout her years of work for the Royal Children's Hospital:  "I do think that the great joy for me in my time at the hospital was this close contact with everyone from cleaners to surgeons to management" (p. 127).  Sir Keith Murdoch felt the same way, at The Herald.  It is the loss of this human quality, the personal touch, which she regrets most in the indifference and haste of modern life.

EDWARDIAN

Born in 1909, Elisabeth Greene, as she was, qualifies comfortably as an Edwardian.  This tells us much.  She is anything but indifferent and recollects in her life the ingeniousness and easy grace of her elder contemporaries in that remarkable period.  There are few like her now.

Yet she is not so easily "placed".  A child of an age, she is not fully of it -- then neither is she immediately recognised amongst the succeeding "Georgian" generation, among whom, lingering respectability contended with the opportunities produced from expanding freedoms.  She tells of how, newly-married, she was introduced to George Lambert, who slapped her jovially on the back and insisted that he do her portrait.  Plainly, he had no idea whom he was dealing with and nothing more was ever heard of it.  She is yet to forgive him for the vulgarity.  Much closer to the spirit of Elisabeth Murdoch than any Lambert painting are Rupert Bunny's 1930s' ladies — strong and self-possessed.  Bunny rightly saw a new type of young woman, one very much her own self, but lighter in her gravity;  modern, yet traditionally-minded;  adventurous, but by no means in sympathy with the ephemeral changes of a turbulent age.

Reflecting on an imagined portrait takes us further into the lives, for it was Keith Murdoch, an undoubted connoisseur, who saw a coming-out photograph of Elisabeth in Table Talk and immediately fell in love with her.  She was 18, he 42.  He promptly wrangled an invitation to a dance where she was to be present — and proceeded to sweep her off her feet;  or perhaps it was the other way around.  What resulted is quite tactfully under-played by John Monks, but told in a most charming way.  For surely it is one of the great Australian love stories and one hidden until now from all but a few.  Matches of this kind, spanning nearly a full generation, were unusual then and rarer now, They offend conformist morality.  Murdoch was a millionaire and a distinguished public man, Elisabeth Greene's family was genteel but in reduced circumstances.  Her father was given a hard time at his club and Dame Nellie Melba fell from the heights upon Elisabeth herself.  To little avail.  The couple persevered and much happiness came to them.

ANGLO-IRISH

What was it that he saw?  Really, we will never fully know.  Her Anglo-Irish ancestry may have had something to do with it.  On both sides she comes from Anglo-Irish families with deep roots in Leinster.  The Anglo-Irish occupied a curious position, mistrusted by the native Irish and the English alike.  They formed a close caste and a tangled cousinhood.  Over the centuries they proved to be a people who constantly threw up genius, illuminating the qualities of both nations.  A stubborn independence is on one side, a soaring imagination on the other.  There is formality, civility -- and not a little mischief.  Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw were of this stock;  in politics there is Edmund Burke.  They are not a predictable people unless in the capacity to startle.  In his young bride, Murdoch found a woman able to walk with confidence in the spirit of her own times and who yet stood a little removed, always sure of her own way.  One thing is quite certain:  in time, as she gave more of herself to public life, more and more people were to experience the genius Keith Murdoch saw from the first, for she brings it to everything she undertakes.

PUBLIC SERVICE

Very late in the book, Dame Elisabeth says of herself:  "I don't think of myself as being young, but I can never relate exactly to what being 85 means.  I can't really accept that I'm really old.  I like to imagine I'm ageless" (p. 300).  A sense of belonging to both youth and age is perhaps the most potent quality she has brought to public life.

After her marriage she was summoned, as ladies were, to the respectability of good charitable works.  Lady Latham invited her onto the Committee of Management of the Royal Children's Hospital, something that might have earned her no more than a historical footnote but for the fact that she saw her work through the light of her genius.  It was what she wanted to do.  It was less a task than a way of life.  The Hospital's standing as the great institution it is now, owes a great deal to her.  She had an intuitive eye for every contingency and always thought ahead.  Again, it is in the small, personal touches we see her best at work.  In the result she gave over 60 years to it.  A simple example may tell.  The Royal Children's Hospital has been for years the favourite charity of ordinary Victorians.  In pubs, for example, it is the major collection and fundraiser all the year round.  That prominence owes much to her efforts.  She brought the Hospital to the people.  She was among the first to seize the possibilities presented by the new media, radio then television, in expanding the range of the Good Friday Appeal.  She also managed to extract a lot of money out of the State Government, essentially by staring down Sir Henry Bolte across a table, no mean feat.  He once told her not to ask for any more money for five years.  We are not told whether she kept her side of the bargain or not.

Dame Elisabeth's interests grew and continue to grow to this day.  She was a founding trustee of the Noah's Ark Toy Library, bringing toys to handicapped children.  Again, it sounds elementary;  but the toys needed to be both simple and hard to break:  really a matter of some thought and care.  Likewise, she has become a patron of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop.  As she says, without sure patronage, tapestry, the Cinderella of the arts, would not survive in this country at all.

Lastly, there is the great work of her own imagination, the gardens of Cruden Farm.  Keith Murdoch presented her with the Farm, at Langwarrin, as a wedding-gift.  With it came the talents of Edna Walling, who laid out the gardens.  The long carriage-drive of lemon-scented gums, now famous, is very much in Edna Walling's style.  But that is about all.  Dame Elisabeth was never happy with the plans and almost at once began to change and adapt them to her own designs.  Quite rightly so.  Edna Walling was at home working on hillside terraces.  She was especially a cottage gardener.  Cruden Farm is a park and required a much broader conception.  Gertrude Jekyll's imagination comes to mind, but comparisons are hardly the point.

As with Lambert and Melba, so with Edna Walling.  Elisabeth Murdoch always declined the solicitations of conventional taste.  Rather, she has followed her own genius and in her garden has composed a tapestry, a conversation, her own single and enduring work of fine art.  It is ungallant to conclude upon a criticism and yet I must record one.  For there is far too little in this book about the gardens of Cruden Farm.  They require a study in their own right.  Is it too much to hope that at the age of 85 and full of honours and projects, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch may yet give us this second book?