Chapter Two - ‘An Indubitable Australian’: Renouncing the Father in Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony

Summary

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.

—Robert Frost, ‘Paris Review Interview’

We can never again speak of ‘Australian Masculinity’; there are multiple masculinities on the continent.

—R. W. Connell, ‘Australian Masculinities’

Determined thereto, perhaps by his father's ghost,

Permitting nothing to the evening's edge.

The father does not come to adorn the chant.

One father proclaims another, the patriarchs

Of truth…

—Wallace Stevens, ‘The Role of the Idea in Poetry’

The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony would seem to have little in common with the complex narrative of patrimony of Father and Son. Hal Porter's father, ‘an unfurnished man’ (93), remains a shadowy and indistinct presence for the entirety of Porter's early life story, while it is Porter's mother, and significantly her death, which provides the autobiography's narrative structure. She features so prominently in the text that Porter calls his autobiography ‘my mother's biography’ (62). It could equally be described as a matriography, and might have been fittingly called Mother and Son, though fortunately Porter left this title available for later use. However, as with Father and Son, Porter's text is centrally about the act of renouncing the father in order to assert an authorial identity. In this way, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony has much in common with another Son's Book of the Mother: Augustine's Confessions.