Among Susan Hampton’s memorable poems from the late 1970s are two that explore different stages of her life. “Stockton” is about time spent with her grandmother Violet in the fishing village on the north side of Newcastle harbour; “Jugoslav Story” concerns the early life of her husband Joe, a Slovenian migrant. She reproduces the second of these in her memoir Anything Can Happen, recalling that her grandmother thought she should receive half the prize money when “Stockton” won an award because she had supplied the material.
Surprisingly, these two poems, written nearly fifty years ago, can be read as touchstones as Hampton recalls the most important incidents in her early life, approaching her marriage and her family from different angles, skipping from one to the other and then looping back. From their first appearance in her early pages, Joe and Violet give a kind of structure to a narrative that shifts seemingly randomly from scene to scene.
As a poet, fiction writer and editor who has taught writing in various universities, Hampton is self-conscious about the nature of memoir. Unlike autobiography, as she writes on her opening page, “the memoir is partial, with the capacity for time loops — you are sitting in your car when the movement of your arm when you turn on the radio brings to mind your mother’s arm reaching to do the same thing when you were a child.”
Anyone who’s reached their seventies will have a vast number of this kind of memory — odd moments recalled in intense detail while whole periods of life disappear into the haze of time — and such a method might risk being piecemeal, but Hampton’s recollections are the artful work of a seasoned writer. Of course, she has diaries, boxes of notes, photographs to help the process of memory, but the consistency lies at least partly in her own recognition of her art. She is constantly aware that her perspective may be shifting or distorting the past.
What emerges is a story of Hampton’s emotional and sexual development from the fourteen-year-old who fell passionately in love with Violet’s neighbour, a woman called Tommy, to the nineteen-year-old bride of a migrant, to an adult single mother, and then to a securely lesbian woman open to a range of love affairs with other women. It is also a consideration of the changing social life of Australia, recalling the nature of poverty in 1960s Newcastle, Blacktown, Annandale and rural Victoria.
Hampton grew up in the country town of Inverell, moving to Newcastle where she lived with Violet as a teenager. She was a bright student and by the age of nineteen was a qualified schoolteacher wrangling children in Granville, riding a motorbike and living in a boarding house. She met Joe in a cafe and within a week was living with him in Blacktown. Soon, as was the custom of the time, they were married.
Joe, fifteen years older than her, introduced Hampton to social life in the Slovenian community of Western Sydney, where he drank and played cards into the night with his friends. She was interested in this foreign culture but knew she was out of place, and after a few years she left. Joe followed her to Newcastle and began working for BHP. At this point, they realised that the surname Pisorn would be a handicap in a teaching career and decided — after Joe lost their savings on a racehorse called Hampton’s Pride — to call themselves Hampton.
They soon had a baby, and Susan was eager to return to university. Joe’s friends warned him that this was an ominous sign that she would leave him. The narrative skips over the burdensome years of custody fights and Joe’s threat to take Ben back to Slovenia. Mother and son landed in a house in the Sydney suburb of Annandale shared with various women friends.
As Ben grows up, Hampton decides to follow a new and exciting lover she calls “the gardener” to a farm near Daylesford in country Victoria. The narrative shifts to the community life of lesbian women, their rivalries and love affairs and their attempts to live outside the regular domestic routines of work and family.
Though the memoir follows Hampton’s sexual and romantic experiences, it is not an exploration of self; at times, she appears to be more an observer of the life around her than a participant. At the Sydney Mardi Gras, she leaves her group to wander through the parade watching the other floats and watching the people watching them. On the farm, she needs to be alone to write and spends much of the time during communal parties watching others perform plays, music or spectacular tableaux. She jokes that the term “performing gender” is self-explanatory.
It’s not until halfway through the book that Hampton examines her first love, Violet’s Stockton neighbour Tommy. She had responded immediately to Tommy’s gaze and her energy, and eagerly joins her for dawn fishing expeditions, where they share the excitement of walking out to the nearby shipwreck and sometimes catching fish. Tommy is married to a fisherman who goes to sea early in the morning and her relationship with Hampton clearly gives her pleasure in a rather lonely life. After a while, the local men notice their expeditions and begin calling them “the boys.” The memoir recognises that this early love affair was the most significant of Hampton’s life, giving her a yearning for monogamy despite prevailing lesbian notions of sexual freedom.
Most of the people close to Hampton don’t read literary books. Ben can’t abide his school texts and only likes the work of Charles Bukowski. Joe, Tommy and most of Hampton’s lesbian friends have no interest in literature. Hampton references Edmund Spenser, Gertrude Stein and a variety of her own literary and theoretical reading but recognises how irrelevant it seems to those around her. Her attempts to write a novel about Nike, inspired by a statue made for a Haberfield garden centre, founders on the concept of a character with no childhood and no memory. Anything Can Happen counters this with a richness of experience.
Hampton is interested in other people and seeks out their stories: her father’s wry attitude to farming after his hard childhood, her mother’s childhood consignment to two friendly “aunts” when her parents were too poor to keep her, a Daylesford friend’s sufferings in a country town because of her “hermaphrodite” body, even Joe’s early life of destitution in Slovenia. Tommy grew up in an orphanage and worked as a nurse at the mental hospital in North Stockton.
Are all these stories true? Ben points out that his experience of getting a job at Mick Simmons store was mundane compared to his mother’s version, in which he wins the job by demonstrating his magic tricks to the manager. Ben’s wife prefers Susan’s account. We all like a good story.
Anything Can Happen serves as a kind of elegy for the lost cultures created by poverty and deprivation in the decades before the 1970s. The working people of Stockton and Blacktown spend their leisure time fishing, gambling at the races, watching football, drinking and dining at the local clubs and pubs. They don’t speak about their emotions or read about ideas, but Hampton takes care to give them their due as vital people. She strives to understand the meaning of lives denied the privileges of her own education and changes in social attitudes over the last fifty years. She understands that she has chosen poverty while her working-class family and former husband had no choice.
This memoir might have been the miserable story of a clever girl marrying too young and then embarking on the life of a single mother while trying to work and gain an education; the recognition of her sexuality and struggle to accept it; and a rejection of working-class culture for the Life of Art. But Hampton spends little time regretting her marriage to Joe; she recognises that her parents were supportive of all her moves, no matter how puzzling; and she acknowledges the relative freedoms of her generation. Apart from the nearby beach and dunes, the culture of Stockton is not dissimilar to that of the Newcastle in Elizabeth Harrower’s novel The Long Prospect. But where Harrower’s teenager longs to escape to a more intellectual world, Hampton, a generation later, can honour this culture, recognising its honesty and toughness.
With its unassuming cover and vague title, published by the small press of Puncher & Wattmann, this memoir might have travelled completely under the radar but for its recent receipt of the 2024 Age non-fiction book of the year award. Wise, forgiving and perceptive, it shows that memoir can surpass its rather humble aspirations. •
Anything Can Happen
By Susan Hampton | Puncher & Wattmann | $32.95 | 150 pages
