The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 18

2 AGENDA The Sunday Age 5 August 1990 Death of a Poet Australian folkie Danny Spooner, Bob Dylan, Melanie and, of course, The Doors. There were times when his condition was distressing to his friends. Once, he stabbed vigorously at a self-portrait he had carved in lead. Another time, during a visit to the farm, Buckmaster showed Jenkins his favorite painting: titled 'Self-Portrait', by a 13 year-old schizophrenic boy. Once, when they were no longer living together, Buckmaster visited Kate Veitch in a Carlton house she was sharing with friends including the poet and playwright, Garrie Hutchinson.

"I came home one evening and Charles was In my bedroom sitting on the edge of my bed just looking so terrible 1 1 Willochra ing he could control the effect of the drug. He'd rave to friends about the poetry of Australian Francis Webb or American Kenneth Patchen. After seeing David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' he'd sit up In bed night and day reading T.E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' so that Veitch, leaving home and returning from work, wondered when he slept. Or he would stroll about with the works of Charles Baudelaire in one pocket and Rimbaud's 'Drunken Vessel' the other.

HIS close friend, John Jenkins, shared accommodation with him on several occasions. They eventually differed and separated after Jenkins objected to damage to a house at Kew they shared during wild parties. But they kept in touch and Jenkins was among those who visited his friend during his last few months, at Gruyere. Long before this, he and others would notice extreme mood swings as Buckmaster became non-communicative and generally depressed. Buckmaster once returned with a dressmakers' dummy to the flat they shared above The Source bookshop.

He dressed the dummy and proceeded to paint it until he became frightened by its appearance; so frightened that Jenkins was persuaded to help him carry it downstairs and through the city finally leaving it outside the Melbourne Stock Exchange. The flat had no shower. Light was provided by one fly-specked bulb. Double adaptors were jammed into a single power point. Attached to these were a toaster, electric jug and record player.

Buckmaster would create collages from magazine pictures and listen endlessly to records by the likes of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Retta Hemensley said Buckmaster, who friends say was obsessed by his brother's suicide when the poet was only a small child, "liked to uo crazy She would help him gather cigarette butts from the street to smoke. He would eat candle wax or hold his hand over a flame. She and Kris continued their correspondence with him from Britain during much of the last few years of his life. He died soon after they returned to Melbourne. By then, the excitement was gone, former comrades had gone on to "high power she said, with hostesses for wives, having traded their anarchic fervor for "steel and leather Retta Hemensley Is still uneasy at having quoted from a Doors' song in a letter to Buckmaster from Britain after Jim Morrison's death: "when the music's over turn out the Did this encourage his destructive urge? In one of Buckmaster's most powerful poems, written at Willochra Creek, South Australia, a year before his schizophrenia was diagnosed, he wrote: "What can I say? I now acknowledge yet cannot understand the nature of this of "ice, brooding above He wrote also that "all the dark hints were not, as I had expected, a part of this game The poem, called 'Willochra', showed he was already experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations, says Kate Veitch, who was so affected by his decline and death, she has not been able to discuss it until recent months.

Veitch concedes she was a "fairly wild and wilful just 15, when she met him at La Mama. She vividly recalls the innocence of their love: he had told her he loved her soon after they met at a reading at La Mama in March 1970, before he had even both- From AGENDA 1 Michael Dugan, who published a magazine called 'Crosscurrents', remembers Buckmaster's regular readings at La Mama. "Keeping his head down and mumbling his words, he did not project his poems, but the poems were such that they commanded attention," he recently wrote. "There was, perhaps a stubborn defiance in the way Charles read his poems, as if be were challenging his audience to listen." Kate Veitch remembers differently. "I actually thought he had an incredibly beautiful voice," she said.

Most of the writers were male. It took a brave woman to get up and read her poetry at that time, one said. They who would hang out, sipping coffee into the night at Genevieve's coffee lounge or the old Johnny's Green Room, yack yack yacking about the Vietnam war, Australian culture or what they'd do come-the-revolution. It was a time to lose oneself in the sounds as disparate as Captain Beef-heart's harsh 'Trout Mask Replica' or the 'Songs of the Humpback Whale' in the old Rowden White music lounge at Melbourne University's Student Union Building. It was a time to pore over the American publications at the old Source Bookshop in Collins Street, where Buckmaster and Veitch later worked.

And, at a time when, as one puts it, it was "acid for Buckmaster, recklessly popped pills, trying LSD, mescaline and marijuana (he is not believed to have ever resorted to 'hard' drugs such as heroin), while writing, partying, travelling around the countryside and publishing his own magazine, 'The Great Auk'. He'd take excessive amounts of LSD, claim 'He was so much a product of his own era. He was unable to transcend it. He became a victim of What can i say? I now acknowledge yet cannot understand the nature of this fear The grey pastures Willochra have faded, taken to the air Ah, I see that plain of ice, brooding above me poised prepared to descend at any moment. Now, knowing all the dark hints were not, as I had expected, a part of this game unreal, contrived purposely veiled But rather uncommunicable.

(Hallucinations pass yet the presence grey and frightening and there was blood all over the bloody floor and bed and stuff." He had tried to cut off one of his fingers because voices had told him she "needed a piece of "His finger was not hanging off or anything but he'd done a reasonable job of It And he said that he had been told that I needed to have a piece of him to keep so that's what he had to' do. And he was really upset because It hurt too much. Oh boy. I just thought 'Ohhhh, I don't want this. I do not want this'." ered to ask her name.

And the agony of his decline and destruction of their tempestuous, "terribly Cathy and Heathcliff" relationship. She was "half stupid with happy, early love" the first time she and her lover visited his family farm at Gruyere. She can still see him skimming stones across the surface of the dam. She remembers the bull-rushes near the water, the thick green grass of the paddocks, stunning paintings by his famous uncle Ernest in the kitchen, even westerns by Louis L'Amour read by his father, Jack. When she visited him at the farm again before his death, he was cheered to see her but seemed to have lost his will.

He stood when she stood. Sat when she sat. Followed her to the door, when she left. It was more than just good manners, she said. Just after his death, she returned to the farm for a last time and entered bis room with his mother.

Buckmaster had left her a parcel with several of his most prized books, with a note on one, a collection by one of his favorites, Christopher Brennan. "Kate, please be careful with these things," it said. It was a summer evening and she had visited the farm after work at the bookstore. She can't remember how she got there. She didn't drive at the time.

Neither did the friend who accompanied her. Nevertheless, she vividly recalls a distressing reminder of her boyfriend in his old room. "For anyone who has experienced a bereavement or a grief there are always little worst moments," she said. "There was jacket that Charles used to wear all the time. It was an old air-force jacket I think, navy blue.

His mother opened a drawer In his cupboard and his jacket was there. And his smell came flooding out as she opened it. I almost passed out because he was such a heavy smoker. It was a combination of tobacco and body odors." Michael Dugan, remarked In his recent article in 'Overland' that the poet was "tidying up" In his last months, "preparing to leave nothing He had received a letter months before the suicide, rejecting an offer to help publish some of his poems, with money enclosed to pay for a book he had borrowed from Dugan and lost. While some argue that ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) treatment hastened the onset of his schizophrenia, others attribute it to his reckless use of drugs.

John Jenkins remembers Buckmaster had pills in his pockets most of the time. "Sometimes he just seemed marked for disaster," he said. "He lived very intensely and very fast. He didn't have any insurance policy. It was all or nothing with Charles, all the time." Buckmaster admitted himself to Royal Park psychiatric hospital late in 1970, discharging himself after several days.

He was later readmitted, diagnosed schizophrenic and given ECT which he was to describe as a "roulette wheel" providing relief from his tormented state when the little ball landed in "the right According to Dugan, Kate Veitch, Buckmaster's main emotional support until late 1971, bore the brunt of the self-destructlveness caused by his disintegration. Finally, not yet 17, she could no longer endure his behavior. Veitch remembers seeing him at the institution. "He was kept in a ward with really old people. It was like they just didn't know how to handle him.

The first time I went to see him I Just rolled up unannounced and got directed to the ward he was In. "I was waiting in this foyer and heard footsteps coming down this long linoleum corridor and I knew it must be him but I was too nervous to turn around. And then I did turn around. It was a very frightening change. It was really, really scary.

il x. 11 Vfir" (K She recalls that they separated after an altercation in the city. This was jusf after she had bailed him out of Pei- mage. "He was out oi nis mina God, he was going to take on the bloody world, I tell you. He took a tram into the city and he was trying to see Frank Galbally.

I said don't just walk into guys' line iuis. yuu uavcu i kui auy-- shoes on'. "I said 'you can't go In there'Uke" this. You will get thrown out'. He went-in, he turned around to me and said' 'vou dont have to come In.

man. "He was walking down the corridor between these two classic great hulking chaps In white jackets and I think he was wearing just standard issue Institutional type clothing. He just looked terrible. He looked like a zombie, he really did. She demanded to see the psychiatrist in charge.

"I wanted to know what was going on. Did they understand: him? Did they have a clue what they had in their hands? This guy was a very special person. Well you can imagine what the chief shrink thought of me. Here comes this girl in hippy clothes with long hair saying: 'I want you to tell me what you are doing'. He was not interested at all." She said she was elated when she left.

After spending a couple of hours together he seemed to have returned from the grave. "By the time I left he didn't look like a zombie. He was fantastic. It was like he remembered that there was actually a world outside." Kate Veitch still has the Christopher Brennan book from the parcel left for her by Buckmaster, along with a copy of a 'Jerusalem Bible' Buckmaster had stolen from a bookshop. The incident led to his arrest on a charge of possession after police searched him and found marijuana.

so gutless'. And that was a real turning point for me. Until then I was pretty solid. At that moment I thought: hole, you are not worth it I don't how clever you are. I don't care, how uiieuicu yuu arc.

i uuu i curc--uuw beautiful you are. I don't even care how much I love you, you're not worth--if. And I just walked off." 7- rhorloe nurlrmnQtAr wna good behavior bond at his trial on con HtHnn hp rphirnpri in hta narenta'' home at Gruyere. "If I do it, I'll nothing behind," he had once told-John Jenkins. He spent the last few'" months erasing traces of his literary life, preparing for the moment' might finally escape his hell.

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