fiction – Lyrebird Mountain

Excerpts from Lyrebird Mountain

Laura, the narrator of Lyrebird Mountain, reconstructs here beloved grandmother’s life from diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and her own memories.

Here are some extracts from the book, to tempt your interest:

The Bachmann family come to Lyrebird Mountain…

They first saw the mountain on the second day, a dull, smoky blue wedge against the hard, pale sky of a rainless July. In any other land but this it would have been considered merely a hill of no great height but it had grown to match the family’s expectations and those of the settlers who had first named it.

To Anna, aged eight, it seemed ethereal, as if it might disappear as suddenly as it had come into sight. Which it did from time to time as the scanty forest intervened. “Ho oh!” cried Freddy, always wanting to be first in everything. “There it is. Isn’t it Papi? Our mountain? Isn’t it?” And he ran ahead of the horse team, striking at rocks and tree stems with a stick he’d picked up along the way. The children had heard so much of this mountain, which their father had never visited but, on a sudden whim, bought land there.

They had travelled from river flats and farmland to open forest and grassland already browning under the winter sun. The forest was a dull collection of eucalypt and thin-leaved shrubs, brightened in patches by yellow wattle and the bronze florescences of scrawny pea plants which, to a discerning eye, indicated a possibility of harvesting their leguminous properties to help enrich the shaley buff-coloured soil.

Such an eye was possessed by Martin Bachmann, father of Anna and Freddy and leader of this small group of travellers whose hope of good things to come grew with each hour of plodding progress. Martin knew many things and his brain was like a great cabinet where he stored his knowledge in many carefully-labelled drawers, where it could be drawn out when required. Or so Anna came to fancy in later years when she tried to remember what she could of her father and his accomplishments. He always seemed to be putting new and useful things into this cabinet and had recently added to it an understanding of botany and horticultural practice.

The mountain which was to become their home was his latest and dearest undertaking into which all the energies of mind and body could be channelled. The children had heard so much of this mountain yeti it seemed scarcely real to them; its mysterious forest and wild creatures invested with myth because Papi was such a taller of tales and dreamer of splendid dreams. He had taught them to long for it but still they couldn’t quite believe in it or the possibility of living there.

And now, as they continued to move towards it, they could see that there was such a mountain, first visible as they came to the stop of a steep pinch, then hidden again by smaller, closer hills and the increasing density of forest. The early afternoon sun was warm, the track dusty despite recent light rain. The long ridgeline that marked their destination as an upraised plateau rather than a true mount seemed so far away and yet, Martin assured them all, they would be at the top by tomorrow night.

He drove the horse wagon which contained the family’s smaller possessions. His wife Berthe sat beside him, round and substantial as a dumpling, nursing a baby of five months. Between them sat three-year-old Laurie. The second and larger wagon was drawn by a span of oxen and driven by a man hired for the occasion and with him Liza, seven years older than Laurie, who did not like to walk along the rutted track with the trees so close either side. Liza’s particular task was to mind her younger brother Steve whom, his mother considered, was far too adventurous for a boy of five. So constantly did he fight against any restraint that he had to be tied to the buckboard.

“You will fall out and go under the wheel and be crushed like a beetle,” Freddy told him several times throughout the journey, grinning at his brother’s torment. But Liza’s heart was already maternal, soft as a sponge for soaking up the suffering of others and she put her arm around the child’s squirming shoulder and hugged him close.

The other children hopped on to the wagons when they grew tired but mostly they liked to be on the ground where they found plenty to amuse them along the way. Joe, christened Johannes-Martin, for his father and called Joe by everyone except his mother, walked soberly by the ox wagon, conscious of his responsibilities as the oldest son. Anna and Freddy were quick, restless children who found natural wonders along the track – an unrecognised flower, an oddly shaped stone, a cast-off snakeskin hanging on a branch – and brought these back to the wagons to be admired. Anna went constantly to the heads of the horses and talked softly to them, stroking the broad noses which huffed constantly from exertion. The cart, she cried several times, was too heavy for them! They were too tired, poor dear things, they must be rested more! Martin agreed with her but did not say so. The wagon was piled too high and bore too great a weight. So many possessions, ach! But a new life required the necessities of civilised existence.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Madame Kurcher…

Mrs. Kurcher, or Madame Kurcher as she liked to be called, was very much a woman. Her looks were the kind thought of as typically Spanish, so it was no surprise to discover that she had an Argentinian mother. A fact which Anna learned soon and pondered later as something significant. Madame had shining dark hair, coiled high, very white skin and very full, red lips. Perhaps not quite naturally so. Her eyes were dark and the eyelids very plump and white. Her nose was strong. She kept her waist taut with whalebone, pushing up the bosom to an unnatural height that drew the eyes of men. Like Berthe, she dressed in sombre shades but bared her straight, white shoulders in the evening and carried a shawl vivid with flowers and parrots. She smoked little dark thin cigarillos.

This new quartet of exotics became regular visitors to The Excelsior. Anna barely noticed the other three for they were quiet, intense people and only came into themselves when Madame Kurcher was not in the room. When Madame was in the room, or anywhere around the place, other guests, however interesting and smart, seemed to disappear into the background. What made Madame and her friends exotic was their being avowed Theosophists, which was where the Scott-Dunns had first become acquainted with Martin. This acquaintanceship now became an intimacy and there was many a long, deep discussion in the guest lounge after dinner and the visitors were even invited into the family cottage which no other guest ever was or would be.

Anna, looking back, was never sure just how much her mother enjoyed these people. She had little to say at the gatherings but would appear to listen interestedly, when not brewing tea or passing plates. Or she would sit for long periods, always with some sewing or knitting in her hands, taking it in, while her husband and Madame Kurcher discussed the hope of greater world enlightenment to come. “We are old souls, you and I,” Madame said frequently to Martin, for her more passionate avowals were nearly always directed at him. As well as being ancient of soul Madame had another attraction for Martin Bachmann, she was a medium. In New York where she had lived for many years and also in India, where she had stayed for a time, her power to connect with the other side had been greatly appreciated.

“Must be the backside!” said irreverent Freddy and though the other children, even solemn Joe, giggled at this rudeness they were nonetheless impressed by Madame, even though they could not exactly like her. They were aware of their parents’ belief in a world beyond their own, where spirits resided. Not Heaven, for they had no concept of a particular or personal god. But a parallel dwelling place which housed a further existence. Or perhaps where the unborn waited; souls newly shuffled off and seeking incorporation. They did not believe Freddy when he said that Mrs. Kurcher, as he alone insisted on calling her, was a witch. They believed in witches, well, the little girls did, but witches were evil and physically repellent and lived in the forest. The doors of the guesthouse were never locked at night for there was nothing corporeal to fear but sometimes Anna and Liza, who shared a room, would creep into each other’s beds and assure each other that the night sounds of possums and birds were nothing more sinister. They didn’t name their fears. But they knew, from fairy tales, that witches devoured children.

Exactly what it was that made the forcefully fascinating Madame Kurcher so welcome at the Excelsior remained a mystery to Anna and her sister. They didn’t like her, that was for sure. Not even the infant Harry, whom Madame insisted on calling by his given name, really took to her. She embraced him too fervently and was too lavish in her affections towards all the children except Joe and Freddy, whom she ignored. When Madame and the Theosophists came to visit, to talk of developing self-knowledge and observation without evaluation, there was usually a séance and this would involve other guests if they showed an interest. And many people were interested in such things, back then. It may have been, certainly it seems so now, that as the restless and rebellious century turned, the heirs to western civilisation knew and feared that their very world, rotten as an infected wound, would soon erupt into agony. Religion seemed to be failing them so they looked elsewhere for solace and explanation.

How the séance were conducted and exactly what happened in them Anna never knew. Madame K, as the children called her, would make arch allusions. Martin seemed embarrassed when asked by Freddy about Mrs. K’s magic and warned his second son not to try any of his verdammt tricks in the small parlour where, presumably, the spirits were invited to visit. Berthe told the children she would explain when they were older. What prophecies were made, what messages were passed from the dead to the living, were apparently too awesome for dinner-table discussion. Only tea and lemonade were drunk before and after each session; there would be no accusations of spiritous summonings by those poor sceptics who recognised only the kind of spirit that manifested itself in a glass!

Anna didn’t like Madame K but she found her fascinating in a weird way. “You will follow your father,” the woman would tell her, flashing her large, white teeth and her large, dark eyes which she could invest with so much soulfulness (her own description) that the little girl felt both compelled and repelled at the same time. Anna knew she wasn’t talking about Martin’s many talents and questing intellect. Madame K would question her about the strange dreaming, the wachtraum, which still came sometimes and always the same. Of all the children Anna was Madame’s pet and she brought with her every visit some nice little gift. Always something which Anna would have chosen for herself and because the Bachmanns did not often give presents to their children, except for books and pens and serious things, Anna was grateful and responded by embroidering the waking dream with details from her imagination. These were of the goblin and fairy kind and if these were believed she never really knew.

The real Anna?

I based the early part of Lyrebird Mountain, and the character of Anna, on the lives of Australian naturalist-photographer Hilda Geissmann and her family.

The Geissmanns did indeed come to Tamborine Mountain, south of Brisbane, in the 1890s and established a famous guesthouse there, Capo di Monte, the name of which is perpetuated today in a building, a retirement community and two streets.

I wrote a short biography of Hilda, published in 2023, and put the research material gathered during the creation of that book to good use in the early chapters of Lyrebird Mountain.

Capo di Monte, like The Excelsior, was an instant success that lasted several years and did indeed attract visitors from all over Australia and the wider world – artists, writers, naturalists, scientists, theatre folk, politicians, graziers and wealthy merchants, minor royalty and the governors who represented the British Crown.

The Geissmann children served these luminaries, learned from them and, in the case of Hilda and her brother Barney, acted as guides through the rainforest that they knew so well.

Hilda, like Anna, loved the forest and always felt at home there. She learned to be an excellent ornithologist, orchidist and all-round naturalist, her photographs and articles appearing in many newspapers, magazines and learned journals.

The character of Berthe almost exactly corresponds with what we know of Elfriede Geissmann, whose second name was Berthe, and her physical description matches the photos of Elfriede I have in my possession. Her husband, William Felix, did indeed run off unexpectedly to Paraguay, never to be seen again or heard of by his family. The scene that takes place in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, during World War 1, when his effects are handed over to his abandoned wife by a mysterious German woman, is exactly what happened in real life. And though “Madame Kurcher” is a character of my creation, the Geissmanns did become very involved in Theosophy and Hilda herself, as well as her siblings, was influenced by it all her life.

Once I have got Anna through her childhood, so like Hilda’s, my book takes flight and the Geissmanns are relegated to true history. Anna’s story and that of her brothers and sisters bears little resemblance to that of Hilda and her family, though facts do intrude here and there. For example, the guesthouse did burn down (though two years after the date in Lyrebird Mountain) and though one of the Geissmann brothers went to the 1914-18 war he returned only slightly wounded. Hilda and her sister Elsie married local farmers but they were cousins, not brothers, and though Hilda’s husband, Herbert Curtis, was wounded and did indeed convalesce in the English Lake District, and their house was named Windermere, he was a kind and good husband (or so I’ve been told by those who remember him) and Elsie’s husband, Willie, was certainly not a money-hungry philanderer.

I doubt very much Hilda ever had a love affair like Anna’s but her long friendship with the naturalist/journalist Alec Chisholm, very much her mentor, was reimagined by me into the friendship between Anna and Arnold Clemens. Chisholm, however, did not end his days on the mountain. His death was terrible to Hilda and she paid a moving tribute to him in a speech she gave to the Queensland Naturalists’ Club in 1976.

Again, Hilda’s lifelong closeness to her sister Elsie is mirrored in Anna’s with her sister Liza who lives close by to her on Lyrebird Mountain. Elsie was very musical – taught music in fact – just like Liza and there is some hint in my research material that she gave up a potential concert career to come home and help her mother run the guesthouse. I doubt, though, that Elsie was a lesbian or even knew what one was! She and Hilda grew cut flowers commercially, just like my Anna and her sister and were each other’s confidantes in all matters.

The character of Freddy does draw somewhat on that of Hilda’s best-known brother, Barney. Barney’s memoirs show him to be a charmer with a fine turn of phrase and a great sense of humour – and indeed, when the family first went to the mountain, he was for some poorly-explained reason left at the bottom overnight and had to find his own way up the next day. Imagine that, for a twelve year old town boy! And there was no part-aboriginal guide, either. Barney Geissmann was always a resourceful man who could turn his hand to most things. He is still remembered on the mountain today though, like his briefly famous sister Hilda, there are very few left who actually knew him. And they themselves are now old.

The character of Deirdre Bell is very loosely modelled on a sort of composite of the artists Daphne Mayo and Vida Lahey, both good friends of Hilda’s (especially Daphne) and both connected with Tamborine Mountain. In her, I have tried to convey some of the New Woman, often deliberately naughty and outrageous of prevailing morals, that appeared in Brisbane’s tiny, self-consciously kultured art community of pre-World War 1 Brisbane. A stuffy little city in a huge, barely populated state dominated by the competing values of graziers and blue-singlet unionised labour. Neither of them particularly sympathetic to the arts. Daphne and Vida were not really like Deirdre in character but their independence was unusual for the time and research shows there are some similarities

Arnold Clemens, in Lyrebird Mountain, is very obviously based on the writer/journalist/naturalist Alec Chisholm who is now almost forgotten in Australia, except by dedicated older naturalists. He was a self-educated prodigy with a childhood love of nature that became his life’s passion. He befriended and mentored Hilda early in the twentieth century and their friendship lasted until his death, despite the fact that both could be sharp-tongued and outspoken. Chisholm, in fact, could be downright cranky! And you see a touch of that in Arnold!

After I had published Hilligei, Hilda’s biography, I realised that aspects of her life would make the basis of a novel; in Anna I found the Hilda that my imagination had wanted her to be – more successful, more interesting, more desirable to men. I have set a mystery in the heart of Lyrebird Mountain – the death of Jack Resnik – and there was a mystery at the heart of Hilda’s life, too. Which was that, having achieved modest fame and recognition from the natural science world over a decade or so, she just packed it in. Her name no longer appeared in journals and she stopped taking photographs. Her correspondence with leading naturalists of the day dwindled. She remained a lifelong member of the Queensland Naturalists Club and continued to host and help organise club expeditions to Tamborine Mountain but the Hilda whose knowledge of birds and plants was so respected, who could find the elusive Albert’s Lyrebird nest and photograph it when nobody else could, who wrote articles about her interests that were full of charm and refreshingly non-stuffy, took early retirement. She lived to be almost one hundred, as a farmer’s wife, flower grower and pillar of her community. But by the time she was in her forties, these mundane activities had become her lot.

And as far as I know, she was quite happy with it. When I started my research for Hilligei I interviewed several people who had known her, both family and friends. They all remembered her as a nice old lady. But none of them had more than a vague awareness of her youthful fame and contribution to Australia’s natural science. Sic transit gloria and all that. The captains and the kings depart.

And I like to think that a little of Hilda Geissmann lives on in the Anna of Lyrebird Mountain.

What Lyrebird Mountain is – and is not

Well, it’s not a murder mystery. Though there is a mystery at the heart of the book and that mystery may – or may not – be the result of a murder.

It’s not a romance novel. Though there is romance woven through the story, not just of the kind between humans but the romance of natural things; the romance that’s around us everywhere, every day, if we only learn to look for it.

It’s not a crime novel. Most of us go through our lives, thank the Powers, without being directly affected by crime, though we know it is out there and that we must try to avoid it. A crime may have been committed in Lyrebird Mountain – a terrible crime. And if it was, who dunnit?

It’s not a historical novel although the history of Queensland, Australia and the wider world is recorded through events that affect the characters in the book – over more than a century.

It’s not a family saga – in the usual sense of the word. It is essentially the story of one woman’s life but her story carries the reader through six generations of women with whom her life is linked, from mother to daughter.

It’s not women’s fiction even though the main character is a woman and the story looks at life through a woman’s eyes. I don’t pretend to know the hearts of men; I can only experience them from the outside. But there is other stuff in Lyrebird Mountain besides the affairs of women…war gets a mention and politics and historical events and…yes…even cricket.

An author is by trade and inclination an observer of life and my observation is that novels rarely tell about life as it is. Of course they don’t; the job of the novelist is to shock, excite, thrill, entrance, intrigue, move you to laughter or tears. It’s entertainment, baby, not real life.

And yet, I have learned more in my life from novels than I ever learned from a non-fiction book.

So Lyrebird Mountain is not a genre novel. I did not want my characters to be larger than life, I wanted them to be the kind of people we encounter in our own lives. Life is not well-organised like fiction and people do not always have clear motives. Nor behave logically. Situations go unresolved, mysteries remain unsolved. It’s not neat, it’s not tidy, it’s LIFE.

So when people ask me what Lyrebird Mountain is about, I find it hard to answer. I say it is about love and loss, strength and resilience in the face of misfortune, the power of passion and the even greater power of place. It’s about the relationship between grandmothers and granddaughters and the cruel impact of war. And it’s all set against the historical evolution of a still-young nation finding its place in a sometimes terrifying world. (Yes, yes, I knew it’s an old continent with an older set of inhabitants but I’m talking about nationhood.)

I have often relied on allusion to tell my tale, rather than spelling it all out. As much as possible I have tried to treat cliches like potholes in the road – to be avoided. I don’t insult my readers by telling them the bleedingly bloody obvious! I prefer to let them work it out for themselves. Those who can’t are welcome to discuss it here on my blog.

There is, for example, a constant allusion to the mystery of the rainforest, especially higher-altitude forest like that of Lyrebird Mountain, where mist throws a gauze over the trees and clouds of vapour float up the gullies. I have always found rainforests of any kind – from the mighty Tongass of Alaska to the jungles of Africa – to be mysterious places. Spirits lurk there, ancient as the trees, though spirits of what I am never sure. Like Anna, I sense them, I feel them around me. Whispering. The life of the rainforest, whether in the canopy or on the littered floor, is secretive. If you listen, there is always a scuffling or a rustling or the cries of birds that often have a wailing eeriness to them. As if song or cackle belongs only to sunlight.

Such mystery, such hints of a magic powerful but unseen, can affect people in strange ways. Men have gone mad in rainforests; especially those who have gone there to cut timber and found themselves alone among the tree shadows, their axes suddenly falling from their hands. Women, in my experience, have a better understanding that keeps them safer; visiting as they do mostly to seek and examine plants and birds, doing no harm.

In many ways Lyrebird Mountain is an old-fashioned book. Deliberately so. I’ve gone against the contemporary trend to recast history through modern eyes and ears, in film, in television in books. Where characters speak and act as they do today and not as they did then. For I have lived through much of the timespan of Lyrebird Mountain and know, too, how my parents and grandparents spoke and behaved. And those of earlier generations. And there are, quite simply, things they didn’t do or say because of the prevailing standards of behaviour. Some bold few might have said and done things that broke the code. But most people didn’t. And those are the people I’m writing about. People who set a high price on reticence, restraint, fortitude, good manners and self-control. And who understood the difference between compassion and sentimentality. This is how they coped with the tough stuff. Looking back, it seems amazing to me that they could be happy in a world where even the rich did not have the comforts, conveniences, services, safety measures, medical treatments, social support and readily-accessible entertainment that we take for granted.

But, by and large, they were. Like Anna and her family, they bore it all and carried on.

This is not, I know, the stuff of great drama. But I wanted to write something real. For the kind of readers who like it that way.

I hope I succeeded.