Norman Lindsay's "The Magic Pudding" is set in Australia and is about a pudding that magically replaces any slice that is taken. It may be just a children's book to you but, having entered the Australian psyche at an early age, it seems to have carried over into adult life where it symbolises Australia's welfare system which attracts just as many 'pudding thieves' who think there'll always be a whole pudding.
But enough of my personal social commentary and more about Norman Lindsay's sixth novel, the only thinly disguised semi-autobiographical "Age of Consent", the story of a 40-year-old confirmed bachelor painter and a 17-year-old naive girl living in a beach shack on a lonely stretch of NSW South Coast near the town of 'Wantabadgeree'. There is a farming hamlet called Wantabadgeree near Wagga, far away from the sea, so why Lindsay uses it as the name of a town on the coast is a mystery.
The story is of Bradly Mudgett, a mediocre landscape painter, who, with enough money from his last sales to keep him going for a couple of months in a shack on a remote beach, tries his hand at seascapes for a change. He has his dog for company, and needs solitude to concentrate.
Along comes Cora, who intrudes on one of Bradly’s compositions. He discovers the painting works better with her in it:
[page 114] "At that little estuary from the lagoon Bradly set up his easel, dodging about to find the best viewpoint under the dove-coloured stems of the tea-trees, dripping feathery white blossoms over the water. When that was selected, he had her wade into the water, which came no higher than her calves. Against the blaze of light beyond her, she made a lovely pattern, warm with reflected light, cooled by the shadows, and flecked with minted gold from the foliage above her.
‘Pull up your skirt a bit; hook it up with both hands, like you was wading,’ commanded Bradly.
With one of her strenuous wriggles, which either confessed embarrassment, or rejected it, she pulled the skirt up, but it was so short that being pulled up, it came above her thighs, and revealed their warm mystery golden with light reflected from the water."
Into this idyll comes Podson, a young bank teller from the last town Bradly was painting in, on the run from the police after being chased out the bank manager’s wife's bedroom window while still owing the bank fifty quid invested in slow horses. Bradly is unable to make himself throw Podson out and is stuck with him, literally eating up his savings, until he, Podson, chances on a lonely spinster.
Cora has her own problems with her grandmother, who threatens Bradly with all sorts of retribution, mostly to do with Cora being underage and naked, when she discovers Bradly has been paying Cora for posing, and that money has not been going towards her gin.
Even though it all works out in the end, the book never became as well-known as the movie, released in 1969, three years after the premiere of British film director Michael Powell's other hit, "They’re a Weird Mob".
In the movie, the painter, disillusioned with his shallow New York lifestyle, moves to a remote tropical island on the Great Barrier Reef instead of the more frigid NSW south coast, with location filming on Dunk Island (echoes of "beachcomber" Banfield?) and Purtaboi Island.
This was a wonderful movie. Those who criticise it probably missed the sixties. I don't know what part of Cora's wonderful lindsayan figure you've been looking at most of the time, but did you notice that when she strips off her frock beside the boat and dives nude, she's wearing only a pair of swim fins, but when she gets to the bottom, she's wearing a dive mask and snorkel? I wasn't an auditor for nothing, you know.
For me the real star of the film is Godfrey, the dog who slips in and out of his own collar to fool his owner that he's stayed in place. What a neat trick! Okay, I admit I love dogs - and maybe I'm also showing my age!
I just loved this movie - and so will you. So take a moment out to travel back in time to the swinging but oh-so-innocent sixties. Meantime, I'll take Norman Lindsay's book and re-read it sitting in the sun on the jetty.
