The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Sometimes, with no warning, a rush of images, memories and names comes rampaging out of the past — a kind of existential ambush that takes you back to that 'foreign country' that you thought you'd long since left behind. Usually something triggers this ambush, a name, a news item, a photograph, occasionally even a scent.
In my case there were two triggers within a day or so of each other.
The first was the 40th anniversary of the Adelaide Festival Centre. Opening officially on 2 June 1973, one of the great monuments to the 'Dunstan Decade', it was the first capital city complex devoted to the performing arts, winning that honour by three months in a photo finish with the Sydney Opera House.
The second trigger was, sadly, the death of actress Penne Hackforth-Jones (pictured).
During the late 1970s I was writing a book on Henry Lawson. Hackforth-Jones was the great granddaughter of Lawson's contemporary, Barbara Baynton, whose bush stories were even grimmer than Lawson's.
We met during a conference in Sydney. She was charming, witty and a mine of information about our mutual interest, Australian literature of the 1890s. She was planning to write a biography of Baynton which, despite a crowded stage and film career, she completed ten years later — Barbara Baynton: Between Two Worlds.
One of her brief early roles was as Ginny Campbell in the long running ABC TV soap, Bellbird. In the same series, an emerging actor named Robin Ramsay played the part of shonky stock and station agent, Charlie Cousens. When, after many episodes, Ramsay wanted to move on, Cousens was 'killed off' — as I remember it, he fell to his death from a silo. Hundreds of viewers were enraged and some sent flowers to the ABC for Charlie's funeral.
One of Ramsay's post-Bellbird plans was to indulge a long time interest in Henry Lawson but many commitments intervened, including playing Pilate in Jim Sharman's long running Jesus Christ Superstar, and he didn't get round to his Lawson project until 1977. When he did, he wrote to me asking permission to use a quotation from my Lawson book, The Receding Wave, in the theatre program for his The Bastard