Actor, playwright, author and teacher Ned Manning has written a novel set in the 1940s and based on the lives of his visionary parents, his father a progressive Coonabarabran shire president and Ben Chifley protégé who stood for Labor in deeply conservative central west NSW, his mother a socialite and budding artist whose ambitions were crushed by World War II. Manning has described the book, Painting the Light, as a love letter to his parents.
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"I have lived in Balmain (in Sydney's inner west) since 1980, apart from five years in Melbourne. I came to Sydney from Canberra to do my first acting role, in a show called The Restless Years - I was Danny the taxi driver, and I think it was the worst acting in history.
What do I love about Balmain? Community, 1, 2 and 3. I am from the country initially, which is what my book's about, and I just thought I had arrived in a country town. I am a walker. I go to Dawnie's all the time - I have swum there from the days when most people wouldn't, before it got cleaned up, and I was involved in the saving of it back in the '80s or '90s.
I love that I walk down the street and I know a whole lot of people - I'm a regular at Bertoni's, where I chat with the guys about the footy, I'm a mad Tigers fan. I go to Leichhardt Oval whenever I can. I have seen Balmain transition from being working class - when I first moved in I lived next to Lever and Kitchen, and had the smell every morning of soap powder getting made.
I was born in Coonabarabran, in the central west of NSW, and lived there until I was five, when we moved to Sydney for a while; all sorts of things happened in the family, and we moved back to a property out of Queanbeyan, then Rylstone near Mudgee, which was amazingly beautiful. I was there for my teenage years, although I was also at boarding school.
I hate to admit it, but I went to Kings like my dad. Everything the school stood for was the opposite of what my family stood for - both my brothers were at uni and they were protesting against the Vietnam war, and I'd go back to school and we'd have to march around in these stupid uniforms. I couldn't get out of there quick enough, and I went to Newcastle Uni, which couldn't have been a more different place.
It has taken me 10 years to write the book. When I look back at the photos of my father - he died at 67 but he looked 87, and I have got this amazing photo of him in the Army, and he was 26 but looked 46. I think the thing that has always obsessed me is what those people went through, and what they endured is unspeakable.
During World War II, my father went to Palestine - they were there for 13 months training, then they went into war. This wasn't like you knocked off at lunchtime or had the weekend off. It was unrelenting. And he lost his best friend. It was just terrible. It was hell. My mother had a same but different war experience, being part of the Women's Army and working on her family property at Trangi. She'd been an aspiring young artist in Paris - which was pretty radical in the 1930s - and then suddenly she is back on a horse on flat, arid, dry land. The last thing she ever wanted to be was a stockwoman. WWII took her life in a different direction.
"I do feel closer to my parents, having written the book, especially my mother."
I know they carried that through their lives. I was too young to ever talk to my mum about it, and I don't think she would have been capable of it anyway, but my father, I wasn't too young to talk about it with him, but he just wouldn't and I just didn't feel I could push him.
My mother died when I was 12. She wasn't very well and I barely saw her. I have half-a-dozen memories - one is of her changing gears in a car, taking a cigarette out of her mouth. So I suppose writing the book has been important for that, me reconnecting with her. The thing, being older myself, is we dream, weird shit that you don't know why you're dreaming it now. I have had a very easy life in comparison to my parents, and I can only imagine what my father was dreaming, and I can kind of understand why he got up early in the morning and went off and didn't talk through the day.
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So that is one of the main reasons I wrote the book, trying to understand that, and understand with my mother how this absolutely stunning young woman, who was photographed by Max Dupain in 1936 for People magazine, who was the life and soul of the party, vivacious and artistic, and her life just crumbled. I have had that in my head for as long as I can remember, really.
I do feel closer to my parents, having written the book, especially my mother. I was close to my father - I was with him when he took his last breath. He didn't understand me, he thought I was a bit odd - when I gave up teaching to become an actor, he wasn't very impressed by that idea - but he loved me and we got on really well.
I have always felt I have inherited my artistic temperament, for want of a better phrase, from my mother. And I don't think dad got it in my mother, and I don't think he got it in me. And that is not in a negative way at all. It is just, we are all different."
