30 LISTENER JUNE 1 2019
D
ulcie Deamer, Queen of
Bohemia: she reigned over
all manner of deplorable
high jinks in Sydney’s avant-
garde precinct of Kings Cross
back in the 1930s. There she
is, in an online clip from a
60s Australian Broadcasting
Corporation documentary about the Cross,
stylish hat on head, a plum in her mouth
and fag in hand. “I always acted naturally
and I’m very fond of life,” she explains, of
her days of doing the splits while scantily
clad in leopard skin at drunken parties. She
worked hard as a journalist, she says point-
edly, and never mixed drink and work. No
one mentions where she comes from. But
when she reminisces about the dives she
inhabited in her heyday and the accompa-
nying “bid” bugs, her vowels give her away.
And possibly her constitution: “Thanks to
my ancestry I could drink a lot and it didn’t
do any damage.” She was a Kiwi.
If she hadn’t existed, Stephanie John-
son, esteemed New Zealand writer who
likes a good story, might have made her
up. Deamer was one of a cohort of New
Zealanders born early-to-mid last century
who absconded to Australia. In her new
book, sardonically titled West Island, John-
son stalks and reclaims five. Along with
Deamer, there is painter Roland Wakelin,
the first artist to exhibit at Sydney’s Mac-
quarie Galleries; journalist and compulsive
gambler Eric Baume; writer and passionate
communist Jean Devanny; and poet Doug-
las Stewart.
Johnson had come upon them in her
reading. “Queen of Bohemia, who was she?And then, of course, marvellously, it turns
out the Queen of Bohemia was good friends
with the Witch of Kings Cross – both were
New Zealanders.”The Witch, Rosaleen Norton, painted
wild, occult scenes in the 40s: “flame and
fire, horned Pans, snakes intertwined with
giant penises ...” There were “various sex
rites”. English conductor and composer Sir
Eugene Goossens got mixed up with her. A
career-ending scandal ensued. Yikes. “My
mother-in-law, who has lived in Sydney all
her life, remembered all of that happening.”
West Island is a useful corrective to the myth
that the past is a foreign country, one where
people were better behaved.
The book dashes back and forth across
the Tasman, which makes Johnson just the
writer for the job. We meet at the slightly
bohemian-looking Grey Lynn villa she
shares with her husband, film editor Tim
Woodhouse. He’s Australian. Two of their
three children live in Australia. One is a
musician, the talented and very tall Sky-
scraper Stan, whose songs are like short
stories. “I’ve always been fascinated by
how close we are and also how different
we are,” Johnson says, of our relationship
with Australia.
“I lived there for much of my twenties
and continued to be published there for
years.” The book is partly autobiographical.
In it, Johnson describes her initial culture
shock. “When I first went to Australia, the
things that were different were the birds and
the men,” she says. “They were loud, man.”
Perhaps those rackety birds and boys had
an effect. She has an inclination, in the res-
onant voice of a sometime actor, to call a
spade a bloody shovel. The women in her
book – Deamer and Devanny – have tough
lives and get on with them. “Sometimes I
find myself growing very impatient withCOULDN’T
MAKE THEM UP
Writer Stephanie Johnson likes a good story and she’s
found one in a collection of colourful Kiwis who made
their mark across the Ditch. by DIANA WICHTEL ● photograph by TONY NYBERG
DA
VID
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HI
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STEPHANIE JOHNSON
“I’ve always been
fascinated by how close
we are and also howdifferent we are. When
I first went to Australia,
the things that weredifferent were the birds
and the men. Theywere loud, man.”