|
Mullumbimby is the Australian town where DH Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo is set, but it’s not the town near the Queensland–NSW border. Lawrence described – with such accuracy that he still seems to haunt it – seaside Thirroul, 69 kilometres south of Sydney.
‘The town trailed down from the foot of the mountain towards the railway,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘a huddle of grey and red painted iron roofs. Then over the rail line towards the sea, it began again in a spasmodic fashion… There were wide unmade roads… little bungalow homes… Then quite near the inland, rose a great black wall of mountain or cliff…’
That long escarpment running north–south, Lawrence’s ‘dark tor’, separates a series of villages from the world. With this massive unchanging presence behind and the roaring sea, cliff-hugging beaches and panoramic views in front, a spiritual ambience infuses every aspect of being there. It must be what has always drawn artists, inventors and writers – current South Coast residents include writers like Peter Corris and actors such as Miranda Otto.
Thirroul is midway along the chain of small communities that snake their way up the coast towards Sydney from Wollongong. Fairy Meadow leads to Woonona to Bulli, then Thirroul transitions from suburbia to the picturesque villages of Austinmer, Coledale, Clifton, Scarborough and Stanwell Park, each with its own distinct character, connected by Lawrence Hargrave Drive – named after the aeronautical pioneer who flew his early flying machine made of four box kites at Stanwell Park in 1894. To the east, the Pacific Ocean; to the west, the Illawarra escarpment.
The Wodi Wodi tribe’s word ‘Thurrural’ means ‘the Valley of the Cabbage Tree Palms’ after the area’s prevalent flora – also noted, as well as the presence of Aborigines, by Captain Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks in 1770. But the town was known as Robbinsville until 1895.
By the 1920s Thirroul had had fifteen years as a charming seaside resort, but it was losing tourists to its Cornish-look neighbour Austinmer. Thirroul was becoming more industrialised – a new coal-fired brickworks that opened in 1919 amplified the pollution already caused by the railways. Cottages for rent were hard to come by – railwaymen’s families had taken advantage of the higher vacancy rate during WWI.
But there was a hub of intellectuals and artists led by Dr Francis Crosslé, the ‘doctor to the artists’, an Irishman who knew WB Yeats and had been in the Abbey Theatre.
Thirroul still feels unpretentious – just like when it was part of a string of working-class villages where residents depended on the local coal and brick industry for their living. If you went looking for ‘Wyewurk’, the house where David and Frieda Lawrence wintered in 1922, you’d probably get directed to the wrong end of town with a curt ‘It’s somewhere down there, mate.’ Joseph Davis is local author of DH Lawrence in Thirroul. When he was studying Sons and Lovers at Bulli High School in 1973, he put up his hand to remark on Lawrence living in Thirroul and was roundly chastised. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the teacher.
Author Robert Louis Stevenson passed through in 1889 and 1890, and many believe the initials of Lawrence’s hero Richard Lovatt Somers are a deliberate match. Stevenson wrote a short story about the railway line falling into the sea at South Clifton during one of the raging downpours the area is famous for. Over a century later I found that story strangely prophetic – Lawrence Hargrave Drive north of Clifton was closed for two and a half years because of a one-metre-wide crack opening up and more than fifty rock falls between 1996 and 2003.
‘It’d make it much easier for everyone if the road did just fall into the sea,’ Thirroul restaurateur Michele Rizzo told me, as he attempted to coax us into add-on sales of garlic bread, salad and sweets at his Hideaway Trattoria. ‘Then they could fix it.’
He was upset – business was slow because the road closure affected the popular coastal access from Sydney.
We drove north, planning lunch at the Imperial Hotel on the precipice at Clifton. ‘Oh mate,’ the barman groaned. He couldn’t say if lunch was on; things were so slow the cook had taken off.
Farther up, just where the road was closed, a small reserve overlooks the sea. It was here in 1797 that shipwrecked sailors discovered a six-foot seam of coal, the second in Australia, leading to the Illawarra coal industry.
Between the reserve and a house were several long piles: one of coal, one of weather-beaten timber planks, another of odd-shaped pieces of wood. I picked up a lump of coal. It was as big as the palm of my hand and smelled ancient, musty, evoking long-ago fires in the combustion stove at home. It was a dark grey, but lighter than charcoal, and as I wondered about that expression, black as coal, a man appeared quickly from the huge cacti on the grassy cliff top. He was tall, lightly tanned, barefoot, dressed in baggy colourless shorts and a faded pink T-shirt. He looked about forty, with midlength wavy hair and chiselled features. Down his nose and across his forehead, pink zinc cream in two disconnected daubs almost made a letter T. In his hand he brandished ancient pliers.
‘You better not take any of that,’ he said.
‘Is it coal?’
‘I use it in my combustion stove. I used to get it when it fell off the trucks but now the mine’s shut.’
He told me the mine shut that year. But it was actually over a decade earlier in 1991 that Coalcliff Colliery, the largest underground mine in Australia, closed after 114 years. No wonder he hoards his coal.
‘Where are you coming from?’ As he spoke he looked somewhere to the side of my left shoulder.
When I said Melbourne, he exclaimed, ‘Jeepers!’
All his life he lived in that house – the last one before the wild roadside coastline drops steeply down to the sea. A low and verandahed old weatherboard, with many of the windows missing and badly in need of a coat of paint. But his presence undoubtedly saved it from a multimillion-dollar redevelopment.
‘That’s old Bob,’ the Imperial owner said. There was now a general feeling of relief – the cook and several lunchers had shown up. European, friendly, she said his family were the local real estate moguls: ‘He’s sixty, fit as, bathes in the sea each day and does everything like his mother taught him to.’ Hence the zinc cream. He keeps to himself, she said, and one day threatened her with an axe when she wanted to take a short cut along the cliff-top path he maintained.
The Imperial backs onto the sea, and a deck commands a magnificent view. Inside, trompe l’oeil plants and scenes decorate a wooden-floored lounge. We spent a happy half-hour enjoying a brown ale, relaxing in wrought-iron chairs with the newspapers.
But now that’s all changed. The brand-new $49 million, 665-metre Sea Cliff Bridge, built where the escarpment plunges into the ocean, makes a spectacular solution for the crumbling seaside drive. With its cycle and pedestrian pathway the bridge sweeps high next to the cliff line and shelters, far below, a whole marine world of dolphins, penguins, abalone, stingrays and visiting whales.
Even better, the Thirroul Olympic Pool – sea-fed, cream and green–tiled, opened in 1940 – has had a $410,000 makeover, just in time for the summer holidays. I wonder if the blackboard is still there. That spring day when I was there it listed the water temperature as ‘16 degrees, cool’.
DH Lawrence’s stay has inspired many celebratory works. Painter Brett Whiteley had long been aware of Lawrence wintering there in 1922, even collaborating on a diptych, D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul, with Gary Shead in 1971. Nine years earlier, Peter Sculthorpe composed a work based on Lawrence’s portrayal. In 1992 the Thirroul Beach Motel, then called the Oral Eagle Motel, gained infamy for being the place where Whiteley met his end via a methadone overdose. He seemed to be with us as we crossed the road to the beach, past the fragrant, fantastic confetti of frangipanis.
Apparently the best view you can get of ‘Wyewurk’ at 3 Craig Street is on a surfboard, about a hundred yards out, and I wondered if any of the fifteen surfers picture themselves in that lush, grassy back garden. The house is hardly visible from the road. A high fence and a dilapidated garage – the first purpose-built, architect-designed garage in Thirroul – hide the low roofline of one of Australia’s first California bungalows, built in 1913.
It is only from the beach, looking up the rocky cliff to a precarious viewing platform, that you see the three Norfolk Island pines and know it is the right spot. Clambering across the rust browns and dark ochres of the rocks, I picked up black weightless pebbles of coal, worn smooth by the sea after spilling out of the carts Lawrence described carrying it down to the ships.
A rock monument to Lawrence at the grassy cliff-top reserve bears a verdigris quote from Kangaroo: ‘And so the great tree-covered swoop upwards of the tor; to the red fumey clouds, red like the flame flowers of sunset.’
Often solitary people stand there looking over the sea, perhaps imagining that time eighty-four years ago. Surfers congregate at seats – as a teenaged Davis was doing when he learned about Lawrence via posh-looking people driving up and enquiring, in plummy accents, which house was ‘Wyewurk’.
The current building fever has not escaped Thirroul. The property boom means half-million-plus prices. Disputes between residents and the Wollongong Council – about building heights, about the use of nearby wetlands for development, about the difficulties of living in the midst of yet more immense change in the area – have resulted in a new development plan hailed for its high community input. But change is not new. Tourism has always impacted on the Illawarra – from the denuding of trees along the beaches for campers’ firewood to the purloining of the once-lush flora along the escarpment – and the growing number of Sydney commuters stretches transport infrastructure.
‘People come here to Thirroul for a particular cultural identity that has been built up over 100 years,’ Guy Freer, Thirroul Theatre Restoration Project spokesman, has said.
That community spirit shines on the Thirroul Seaside & Arts Festival weekend, taking over the town on 1 and 2 April 2006. In its 15th year, this all-free event is, amazingly, still totally run by volunteers. This year over 300 artists and 700 performers will feature in art exhibitions, arts-based activities like an art trail and workshops, plus rides and buskers.
Whether it’s driving the new bridge, visiting the arts fest, plunging into the history and/or the water, or just getting out of town – Thirroul and its surrounds are so real it always feels like going home.
Thirroul Seaside & Arts Festival runs on the weekend of April 1 and 2 2006.
Copyright © 2006 Jackey Coyle
| 
