We had stopped at Dean’s Marsh on a late-summer Sunday drive to the surf beach at Lorne. I had been curious to see if a small cottage in the town - an early photograph of which I had seen in the autobiography of Marjorie Lawrence - still existed.
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Dean’s Marsh? The town I had passed through so often on the way to Lorne in 1978,’79, '80, '81 and '82 with two very small children - their limbs growing longer each year so that they could eventually kick the driver’s seat and cleverly, annoyingly, wind down the windows with their summer-sandalled feet. Dean’s Marsh was the gateway to the Otways - the forest that ceased to be after a Wednesday night in 1983; the night their mother came home from a Hollies concert when the stage had been enveloped in smoke, and the only reason she knew it wasn’t a smoke machine was the acrid smell of burnt eucalypt that filled the auditorium. Earlier that night I had been watching some gritty British black and white police drama on ABC Channel 2 when the broadcast suddenly hemisphere-flipped to a rolling newsflash a mere eighty miles from where I sat in inner-inner-inner-city Carlton. A live-to-air camera in a helicopter held focus on a red hot line of fire - a Tim Storrier nightmare yet to be painted - that had combed over the mountains and was seething angrily along miles of shoreline, like some linear solar flare, impotently trying to devour the surf after having turned a million bush marsupials and several humans in the mountains to char.
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We - two of the teenagers, their mother and I - got out, stretched. Dean's Marsh is now just a couple of shops - one is for sale - but the local tourist authority still describes the town as a 'vibrant community', but that usually means a few arty types have retired here from the city. We had parked near the main intersection, where a large sandwich board sign read ‘Book Sale 200 metres’, an arrow pointing the way. A few minutes later we were standing in a farmer’s barn expecting piles of old paperbacks with fading covers and lurid titles typical of barn sales. Instead, the cavernous outbuilding was lined with shelves ordered into bookshop-like subject areas, holding thousands of volumes, many rare, and all in alphabetical order. It was like Kay Craddock’s Antiquarian Bookshop transplanted to a Western District paddock. We emerged forty five-minutes later with a first edition Oscar Wilde’s Complete Works introduced by Vyvyan Holland and No Road Goes By, a lost Australian novel by Myrtle Rose White.
Halfway back to the corner I saw the rock. It was under a tree in the garden of an old timber cottage. The rock was too big and round and obvious to be anything other than a memorial. I had to lean over the picket fence to read the words cast on the bronze plaque: 'World famous soprano Marjorie Lawrence CBE Legion d'Honneur, the Sun Aria winner 1928, was born in this house 17th February 1907. Died 13 January 1979 at Hot Springs Arkansas, USA. Plaque unveiled by Lindsay Thompson, Deputy Premier of Victoria, 21 September 1979.'
Fractured grammar, and the politician gets himself engraved for eternity as well as the renowned soprano, but still, the humble almost-unreadable-from-the-street commemorative plaque is there. Marjorie Lawrence is otherwise virtually unknown in Australia.
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Visiting a Berlin music store in 1939, Wagnerian soprano Marjorie Lawrence had asked for the score of a Mahler song-cycle. The staff member froze. Lawrence wrote in her autobiography: ‘Not until I had answered questions about my nationality, the purpose of being in Germany, and why I needed the music, was a copy produced from a hiding-place and handed to me as if it were a hatful of vipers.' Lawrence missed Bayreuth, but a cruel fate unrelated to her career awaited.
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We drove on, into the forest. Eventually the ocean appeared, an electric blue mirage through the trees that swirled, disappeared and reappeared as the car took the hairpin bends on the downhill approach.
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The Salty Dog is a eat-in and takeaway in the middle of Mountjoy Parade with a decade-by-decade history of Lorne inscribed on its walls as a kind of décor. On another wall, fans of esoteric music will appreciate the rendering of the 1969 Procul Harum album cover after which the cafe is named. It gets five stars just for that, but the Whale Burger was probably the largest burger I’ve ever seen. It took both teenagers to eat it. Beetroot included. Beetroot is good. That pickled taste adds a certain je ne sais quoi.
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Interrupted Melody, Marjorie Lawrence. Invincible Press, Sydney, 1949
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