DAME ELISABETH MURDOCH

ACCORDING TO THE LABEL IT’S A FOUR-MAN TENT, BUT THEY’D HAVE TO BE PRETTY SMALL MEN. IT FITS MY SON AND ME SNUGLY.

Their campervan hums and glows cosily as they heat up some pies for us in the microwave and pop the telly on for the kids. My son stares, wide-eyed, at the bunk beds, the huge fridge. But he is ever loyal. ‘I prefer our tent,’ he says when the kids question him. He steals a backward look though, as we stroll through the evening down the path to the ‘unpowereds’. We’ve forgotten to bring a torch and peer through the rising blackness for our own little home of ancient Toyota, card table, camp chairs and tent.

Some nights it feels almost unbearably claustrophobic. The relentless heat, the shrill wall of insect song, the stillness, the moon blazing through the tent like a spotlight. ‘Why are we doing this?’ I occasionally ask myself as other campers emerge fresh into the day from the air-conditioned comfort of their caravans.

The tent netting starts to get small holes in it. From embers? Insects? Being rolled up on stony ground? I get out the duct tape and cut a dozen pieces. My son stands outside the tent and I sit inside. We stick the pieces of tape together over the holes, our palms pressed together. Every few weeks we add a few more squares of tape to our increasingly mosaiced tent.

On windy nights I worry about falling branches. Sometimes I adjust the car’s position three or four times before I’m satis ed that if a casuarina tree goes over, the car will break its fall before it hits the tent. There’s a lot to worry about. Water and fuel supplies. The state of the car. The heat. That snake I spotted on the edge of camp earlier in the evening.

But in the tent, we feel safe, peaceful. After even the longest, dustiest days, it’s a sanctuary; more than the sum of its modest parts.

One night on the Tanami Track in the Kimberleys, after changing a blown tyre in forty-degree heat, we camp beside the dusty, deserted road where the tyre forced our stop. There’s a small clearing in the spinifex, just big enough to pitch the tent. A gentle breeze comes up as the sun sets peachy gold across the desert. We wash the dust from our skin with water from the billy and eat avocado on crackers, sliced pepperoni and chopped apple. Then we fall into the tent exhausted. The desert night cools fast. No need for the fan.

The bush pulses up against the ne membrane of our tent. Sometimes gently, sometimes with blustering force. From our tent we watch for shooting stars and shine our torches to catch the eyes of possums and, one night in the rainforest, a cuscus. We feel but never see the swoop of a silent owl ying by in the dark. In the mornings we wake to birds. Some days it’s a few sweet coos from peaceful doves and spinifex pigeons or the pretty warble of magpies. On other days it’s a riot of squawks and screeching from budgies, lorikeets and corellas. We open our eyes to dawns pink and orange, to lightning and gathering clouds, to the clearest of blue skies. Around us are the traces of the night’s activities: tiny tracks in the sand or the dust made by the smallest of marsupial paws and tails. We make our own tracks as we break camp, our tent leaving just the faintest shadow of a square in the dirt. n

DAME ELISABETH MURDOCH

Married at 19 to her media mogul husband, petite Elisabeth Greene was fated to become the formidable matriarch of a powerful dynasty. But to the end of her long life, her true loves were her family, her garden and her charitable work.

Words Mark McGinness Photography Simon Grif ths

We have been graced with fewer than 70 Dames in our country’s history. In the course of a century we have honoured legends like Flora Reid and Florence Bligh, Nellie Melba and Mabel Brookes, Mary Gilmore and Mary Durack. And Elisabeth Murdoch. A Dame for half a century, she was among the longest-lived DBEs in the Empire’s history—only outrun by Olivia de Havilland and Elizabeth May Couchman (a co-founder of the Australian Liberal Party, who lived to be 106).

She survived her beloved husband, Sir Keith, by six decades and lived to see her son and grandsons build upon her husband’s legacy. She was quoted as saying, ‘I can’t possibly die. I want to see what Rupert is going to do next.’ In her own right, she left the most remarkable and sustained commitment to philanthropy, said to donate to 110 charities annually.

Another signi cant strand of her life, and one that brought her joy, was the garden she created at Cruden Farm, on the Mornington Peninsula, her home for 80 years.

Born four months before Errol Flynn and six months before the death of Mary MacKillop, she was the third and youngest daughter of a wool broker, Rupert Greene, a reckless Anglo–Irish charmer, whom they all loved but whose gambling regularly forced the family to let their Toorak home, Pemberley. Like the Austenian owner of Pemberley, Mrs Greene—Marie Grace de Lancey Forth—was proud of her descent; in her case, from a court chamberlain to King George III and an aide-de-camp to Sir George Arthur in Hobart; she was an intelligent, serene and gritty beauty without whom, Elisabeth’s elder sister Sylvia said, ‘we would have lived behind the privet hedge at Flemington’. Some enterprising and in uential friends organised Rupert’s appointment as the of cial starter for the racing clubs, a position which forbade him from betting and reduced, but did not eradicate, nancial crises throughout his daughters’ childhoods. It surely in uenced a sense of thrift in their own lives.

At 14, after being educated by a number of governesses, Elisabeth was sent to board at Clyde School, near Mount Macedon, where she thrived, especially in sport. Her godfather John Riddoch, an old family friend, paid the fees.

Keith Murdoch, 42-year-old Melbourne Herald editor and powerbroker, had sought out 19-year-old Elisabeth, not long out of school. He’d seen her photo in Table Talk, an >

Above Elisabeth found architect Harold Desbrowe Annear’s renovations to the Cruden Farm house ostentatious, and set about ‘burying it in the garden’. She always preferred to use a side entrance.