About Harriet Chandler

HARRIET CHANDLER is a fictional biography, a hybrid text that dwells on textuality, meditates on intertextuality. Chandler first appeared as a minor character in Murray Bail's 1987 novel Holden's Performance.

Harriet Chandler's a remarkable character: a victim of Australia’s 1930s–1940s polio epidemics, she has a house, drives a car, runs a freelance career as a visual artist, and conducts lone protests against the Queen’s visit and a Miss Australia quest held in Manly’s Epic Theatre.

This is her back and forward story.

     EXRACTS:

You see what you can become, on occasion.

Like the detritus on the shoreline, something shifts and changes, leaving traces behind, a former coating, a carapace, a casing.

That’s it, you say, the image you see. It's whole and clear. You want to hold onto it.

But it’s momentary. You lose it, that space you inhabit so briefly.

You wait for it to come again.


 

When Harriet Chandler saw the harbour as she looked out from the top floor
of her house in Kangaroo Street, Manly, or came down the hill to Circular Quay from Sydney’s centre of business, ‘It’s the eighth wonder of the world,’ she exclaimed. Her heart opened like a front door. She was soothed, and at the same time she was excited. ‘“See” what do they say “and die”? It’s this. “Oh, Australian, have you just come from the harbour?”’ She had grown up with her feet in sand, her torso in seawater, her head in sunlight and blue sky. The infinity of blue, like the Australian sky, allowed for lightness of being, for movement.

Joy and Bart Chandler named their daughter for Beecher Stowe’s stance against the pornography of slavery, and for Backer, the Norwegian impressionist. They liked the way in Backer’s painting, Blue Interior, the young woman’s foot twisted back underneath the hem of her full-length dress as she sat absorbed meditatively in her sewing in the light of a window, and the way the room contained a large pot plant, a vase and a painting of a boat. Not long after Backer died, Harriet was born.

 

Bart Chandler read palaeontology, archaeology, biology, history and politics. He was pleased with his daughter’s naming. He learned that a Galapagos tortoise brought to Australia by Darwin had hit the century mark and gone further. The tortoise, called Harry, had a mistaken gender ascription and was renamed Harriet. Longevity and a capacity for coevolution, Bart Chandler decided, had been successfully conferred on his daughter.

Much later Harriet would speculate that in some failed anagram her name may have come from a combination of ... Hurtle and Courtney and Rhoda and Duffield.

Etymology is a beginning. Names are a fertile space of creation. Words call things into existence, into being from the shadow behind them, like a ship in mist sounding the depth. Things become visible, are made real from words singly and in groups, from the incantation of a list, items, like labelled evidence, submitted for proof. Naming enables jokes about the supposed indisputable trustworthiness of facts and certain determination of origins. Fiction’s wiles are highlighted in contrast.

It is likely that Harriet was born in 1933. That would make her the same age as Holden Shadbolt, the eponymous (anti)hero of the novel Holden’s Performance, the novel from which Harriet Chandler sprang fully formed.

There are no details of her birth or of her life history before or after her contact with Shadbolt. For a time, she was his paramour. (Shadbolt’s compatriots thought she was his femme fatale. But this says less about her and more about them as products of their particular culture and historical time: Anglo-Saxon Australian males born before the second half of the twentieth century with a stereotypical dis-ease with women. Though Harriet represents a positive alternative, mutability, the story stuck to what it critiqued: the stolidness of the Anglo-Saxon Australian male, for we are half in love with our demons, addicted to the dissection of our monsters.)

Harriet Chandler could be an icon of Australian literary womanhood—like Sybylla Melvyn; Laura Rambotham; Dulcie and Eileen Lee; Steve and Blue; Teresa Hawkins; Theodora Goodman and Miss Docker; Margarite Morris a.k.a. Newspaper but more familiarly Weekly; Lillian Singer; Phryne Fisher and Claudia Valentine; Helen Garner’s quartet: Kath, Scotty, Elizabeth (Morty) and Janet; Rosa; Grandmother and the bully; Stella, Meta, Vaia, Mirella and Agape of the Glowing Face; Sally Morgan; Ruby Langford Ginibi; Glenyse Ward. And more. She deserves a space for her story to expand (despite Flaubert scholar Geoffrey Braithwaite’s ninth admonition in a list of ten against writing certain types of novels, novels which are really about other novels, an admonition ignored by Braithwaite’s creator, novelist Julian Barnes).

You can make a space anywhere: in a gap in territory; within a fold, pleat or tuck in fabric; in the opening created by a crack; within the coming undone of the fissure, tear or fray; in the margins. Like living in a hut of your own. A moveable hut? A hut built again and again. Like Lear onto the heath. Uncomfortable, yes: no sheets, no pillow, no bed, blanket or bath. You want a space you can predict, but you get tired of routine. So you throw yourself on chance, change and uncertainty, into the in-between space, like things into the air where things become. And it’s delicately balanced, your artefact, teetering on the edge, holding together in a fragile manner. You ‘read’ it with a kind of alarmed apprehension, waiting for it to break apart and fall over.

Novelists say their work is truth. History, biography and autobiography interpret. Biographical subjects can be private people who leave little documentation for the biographer to write their history. Biographers say it would be easier if their subjects were fictional. Fiction writers have imagination and facts available to them. Facts can be more troubling than fiction: problems with certainty, proof and interpretation. So biographers speculate too. If there is little to pillage then there is more to make up; what can’t be found can be imagined.