Roundabout at Bangalow (21 page)

He tells me of his love for the land his family now farms, flood land on a peninsula in the river; of the big timber house sheltered by a magnolia tree as old as the settlement of the Big River; of hurrying home from school as young as ten to plough behind two horses — proud of his straight furrows and of the flocks of birds who followed his plough, eager for the pickings. He tells me of his longing to fly and of every penny saved as a boy for flying lessons until he won his flying licence just before the war. He has dreamed of this farm and his flying for five long years.

And yet a recurrent and terrifying dream has to do with flying. He is flying over the land like a bird, his body unprotected, vulnerable. He passes high over fertile valleys, deserts and mountain ranges while a pack of howling wolves pursues him, overtaking him on each mountain peak, slavering and howling with rage, leaping in the air, tearing at his unprotected belly, then falling away and racing towards the next mountain top. What can this mean?

I learn too of the moonlit night in New Guinea when a stray Japanese soldier cut a slit in his mosquito net with a razor-sharp bayonet and peered in. They looked deep into one another's eyes for a long minute then the enemy melted away into the jungle. Was this figure, the Japanese soldier, real?

I learn of a failure of love when, sick and disoriented in a military hospital, he wrote a brief note to the girl he was about to marry calling off the wedding. His father disowned him and family bitterness followed him all the way to New Guinea and still hangs in the air. He's determined that, this time, things will be different.

He tells me of his longing for an enduring love, one that has gone to church and been blessed before all the people, a perpetual love, one that wakens each morning in the same bed with the same person, lover and friend as well.

I listen and learn of this and much, much more …

My main problem is that empty glory box, a scandal to my Granny and aunts with their traditional ways. Unbleached calico (no coupons) is made into sheets and hung on the line in rain and sun for weeks to bleach. Towels (khaki and white stripes) are bought from wartime disposals (no coupons) and lingerie is made from a pure silk panel from a parachute. Imagine a
trousseau
(as it is called) made from pure silk trimmed with old cream lace found under the counter of the general store at Chatsworth Island, where it has probably lain unnoticed since the turn of the century. We are used to making-do. During the war years overcoats have been made from grey army blankets, skirts from men's trousers, and woollen jumpers have been unpicked and knitted up to different patterns over and over again. Since I was sixteen I have been making all my own clothes, even tailored suits and ball gowns, but the wedding dress is to be different. It will be made by a dressmaker, a copy in magnolia satin of an illustration from the
Australian Women's Weekly
(where else?). It has thirty-six tiny covered buttons down the back, each enclosed in its own loop. When the wedding is over and I am changing to go away, and everyone else is busy, my father volunteers to unhook all these buttons, his blunt fingers clumsily fumbling with them one by one. He has tears in his eyes and I have too; it's one of our few tender moment in twenty years.

We girls are all hopelessly ignorant, despite the instruction manuals for brides which are passed around. My aunts have spoken to me of the experience of their generation, of the mixture of terror and inevitability with which they approached their wedding night, knowing the facts from their observation of farm animals, but appalled at the very idea that such gross acts could ever apply to their own tender flesh. For them there was no alternative: marriage and endless childbearing or a long and stringy maidenhood helping out with other people's children. It is not much different for my generation: one girlfriend is shocked to learn, at eighteen, that married people have sex for fun, not just to make a baby. Later a friend at Rita Island describes her wedding night when she sat outside in the dark on the verandah steps for hours, terrified of the unknown, before her husband coaxed her inside and into bed. I have no help from my mother. Unable to speak on this most delicate of subjects she behaves as if, on my honeymoon, I'm simply going away for a fortnight with a girlfriend. Meanwhile fear and curiosity are the keynotes of all the stories I hear, and fear is the price we pay for the prudery of our times.

And yet for us it is completely different. We wake next morning in our first double bed in a hotel in Coffs Harbour; with a new vision we watch the sun rise over a sea which seems newly created. We too are transformed. All is changed, changed utterly; we are now
complete,
part of a whole rather than single individuals. We'll torment each other as much as most married people do, but we'll never again be alone. We go down to the jetty and each takes a photo of the other. These snapshots will be known to us, but to nobody else, as
the morning after,
our own private joke; but still our lives have changed forever
.

J
anuary
1950 finds us lying in the dark on two camp stretchers in a twelve-by-twelve tent. The tent is on an uncleared block on Rita Island in the delta of the Burdekin River in North Queensland. This is a soldier settlement block that we've been allocated in a ballot. We are to clear the land, plant sugarcane, wait until our crop grows, then reap a fortune. We've been married two and a half years and this is now our own land, our own farm in the making. All the land-hunger that we've inherited from our Irish ancestors is to be concentrated here. And this will be the first home that we will own, one that will recur in my dreams for the rest of my life as a place once owned, but in which, in one dream after another, I am now an intruder.

Although our camp is on a rise it is at this moment almost swamped, for we are in the middle of the tropical wet. Only new chums like us would have come to this particular place in the wet season and pitched a tent. In the mantle of light shed each night by our Tilley lantern (for there will be no electricity for another five years), a dozen or more kangaroo rats gather to eat the beetles attracted by the light, and any scraps we care to throw. They are gentle and unafraid, unlike the hundreds of possums that squabble in the cocky-apple trees around us. There are whole families of these, from scabby old males with balls like dogs who grunt all night, to little joeys peeping from the pouch as their mothers climb from blossom to blossom, looking for honey. Possum-hunting at night, with a waddy to knock them to the ground and a couple of dogs to tear them to pieces, is a favourite pastime for the young males on the island. Meanwhile anything up to fifty gnarled and grotesque cane toads, repulsive as rats, sit on their haunches in the circle of light and feast on the insect life. Imported to eat the cane beetles that were destroying the cane crops, they've gone feral, breeding in their millions in the moist tropical nights. Their saliva poisons the chooks' water and the chooks die. They spit in the eyes of cats and blind them. Ponds, streams and the very soil itself are tainted by these intruders from another world. They are everywhere, packed in tight clusters under every piece of wood, every scrap of bark.

Our block is unfenced and the wild cattle gather in the smoke of our campfire, hoping, as we do, to escape the mosquitoes. The tropical night falls quickly here, and before we can climb into our camp beds we must wash the mud from our feet in a dish beside the bed then crawl in under the mosquito net and try to ignore the heavy breathing of the cattle. One is a massive red bull and he and several cows are scratching their backs on the wet tent-ropes just through the canvas. In the distance we can hear the booming of a solitary bull crocodile down alongside the anabranch of the Burdekin River, calling for a mate. In the main street of Ayr we see an eighteen-foot monster on display on the back of a truck. One has recently taken a child, a little girl of two or three, from the banks of the Burdekin much further upstream, dragged her into the water, submerged with her until she drowned then, before the horrified eyes of the bystanders, tossed her into the air like a rag doll again and again on its way downstream. Though seldom seen these are the creatures of nightmare. In them are embodied the most primitive and instinctive horrors, perhaps from our Jurassic past.

Around our tent, pitched in its clearing, lie our 157 acres of future farm. It is broken country and will be hard to clear and hard to irrigate. There is open country with massive Morteon Bay gums, smaller cocky-apple trees in their thousands, and pandanus palms to remind us that we are now in the tropics. These open spaces are shoulder-high with coarse grass which flourished in the last wet season and has matured during the long dry. There are but two seasons here: the two or three months of torrential and often cyclonic rain, and the calm and temperate dry season during which the land recovers. The grass is alive with snakes and the carefully stitched nests of green ants hang from many a low limb, promising a fiery and throbbing few hours to anyone who brushes against them. These long-legged green ants are exquisite to look at but, like many things here, are poisonous.

The block is intersected by dry watercourses that will fill as the wet season progresses. Along these are patches of jungle with Burdekin plum trees, tall palms, impenetrable undergrowth, and thick vines roping everything together. There could be anything in there, and there is, including tropical pythons, gold and black, sinuous and beautiful. The bulldozers will make short work of these places and their creatures. We are entranced with our new world. We fancy that we will be numbered among the
first-footers,
those who have taken to the virgin bush with axes, saws and now bulldozers in order to cultivate the wilderness. We are the most arrogant of new chums, but will learn quickly. We have to.

The first two years of married life have not been easy. Despite my husband's wide experience, he has no formal education, having left school (willingly it seems) just before the Intermediate Certificate to help his father dig a particularly heavy potato crop, so only unskilled jobs are open to him. Since the war he has been working for half-shares on his father's farm, an arrangement which is common in the district. Indeed some sons who stay home on the farm are not paid a wage at all and, even when they have grown children of their own, still depend on the family patriarch for handouts, even for the weekly groceries. Our arrangement, that is half shares, is reasonable but won't last, for the old man has an explosive temper. He can slip easily from nowhere into a volcanic rage, his trump card to order any offender, even his son, off
his
land instantly and forever. This happens several times.

There is also the problem of where we are to live, for the housing shortage is desperate. Many young couples are building their own homes, even those who've never picked up a hammer before, and throughout the country people are on housing lists or living with relatives. Key money is demanded for flats and houses, and thousands of refugees are housed in sheds in migrant camps. We begin by renting a room with use of the kitchen, all that is available. Our landlady is a short, waddling woman with black hair which is crimped into iron waves at the hairdresser's salon each week. It remains lacquered and undisturbed until the next appointment and, to make sure, is covered by a thick rayon net which comes halfway down her forehead. She is a compulsive housekeeper and insists that I peg each towel separately with four pegs along the top to keep the clothes line neat, and then iron everything, including the sheets. Moreover she talks incessantly, like a gramophone needle stuck in the one cacophonous groove. Nothing is too intimate to replay, including details of her marriage, her bowel habits and piles, and she expects confidences in return. The butcher, baker, greengrocer and every other caller retreat in dismay, often walking backwards as they are harangued with details of piles which are, she says,
like bunches of grapes
.

She also cultivates groves of arum lilies, usually associated with funerals. No caller, even the doctor on his visits to inspect the much-discussed piles, escapes without an armload of funereal lilies. Her husband takes refuge in the shed where he waters the place he calls his
garden,
a sand-pit with a dozen bottles of beer buried up to their necks in wet sand, and only comes back into the house when he's totally and benignly drunk.
He hasn't hinter-fered with me for hages,
she says with some pride. I am absolutely at her mercy and soon come to loathe the way the spittle sprays from her lips along with her patter. Soon, by some miracle, my father finds us a flat belonging to one of his mates from work. We acquire a bedroom suite in maple veneer, the latest fashion, a kitchen table and chairs, a bakelite wireless set, two lounge chairs and a cat which we are determined to call after the royal baby, the son of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Our flat is right alongside the railway line; Charlie the cat wanders onto the track one night and, dazzled by the brilliant white spotlight on the front of the train, is run over. Prince Charles's luck, long-term, will be little better.

Meanwhile our flat is a refuge for my husband's unmarried brothers and sister, regularly ordered out of home by their father. Looking back from some distance I can understand that my father-in-law's short fuse was the result of his past, a series of cruel strokes of fortune. His own father was Hjalmar Christian Leonard von Wolcker, an aristocratic Swedish immigrant who had been trained as an army officer at the Karlstad Military Academy in Sweden and had married an Irish girl from Clommel in Sydney in 1893. When they met he was working as a coachman at Leura, but he found work wherever he could, finally as a carrier operating from the Darling Harbour wharves and along Sussex Street. After ten years of marriage and a gradual attrition of his name to Harry Walker, his wife died of typhoid, leaving him unable to care for his three sons — my father-in-law, aged eight, and his younger brothers aged four and two. The three of them are taken to the orphanage at Kincumber on the Hawkesbury River run by the Sisters of St Joseph. Here the eight-year-old tries in vain to protect his younger brothers, especially the two-year-old, from the harsh treatment which was usual in orphanages at the turn of the century. He tells stories of the little boy crying for his mother and wetting the bed in the middle of the night then, as punishment, being wrapped in the wet sheet and made to stand out in the freezing cloisters until morning. They are all three barefoot, hungry and starved of affection. Their father makes the long trip by train then ferry to visit his children each Sunday, but has no idea of their week-day world.

I have some sympathy for the Sisters of St Joseph, faced with hundreds of no doubt sullen and intractable boys, and not enough food for the half of them — no loaves and fishes here. Moreover their founder is obviously a megalomaniac. The children are made to pray daily for
Mother Mary's intentions,
whatever these are, but this doesn't put food on the table or flesh on their bones. There is one notable scene where Mary Mackillop visits Kincumber. She is transported from Gosford Railway Station in a buggy and then ensconced, in her wheelchair, on a mound above the orphanage while the children raise their voices in prayer and adoration of their benefactor. She then harangues them for hours in what has been described by one survivor as a shrill and screeching tirade. Finally they file past her one by one and kneel to kiss her ring. This scene speaks volumes: the half-starved children chanting themselves into a frenzy of adulation, the old woman in her heavy medieval robes, once beautiful but now raddled with the effects of illness and (it is rumoured) drink, demanding not merely homage but worship. In the early nineties we visit the orphanage out of curiosity. It is now a tranquil centre for retreat and meditation, but nothing can exorcise the image of a snivelling little two-year-old, drenched in his own urine and wrapped in his wet sheet out in the cold. And then there is the cemetery and the small unmarked graves of those who died there, and of the Irish Sisters who also suffered there for the sake of the poor. Their lives were probably not much easier than those of the children.

One by one, as they are old enough, these three children run away, or
abscond
as the orphanage records put it, my father-in-law to the Clarence River where he works first as a farmhand, then as a cane-cutter. He is only sixteen when he buys a dark suit and neat elastic-side boots — for he is always a fastidious dresser — has his picture taken in the studio in Fitzroy Street and buys his first poetry book, a collection by Robbie Burns. He's obviously a thoughtful young man, determined to make his own way in the world, and there is some evidence that the Sisters intended him for the priesthood, little realising his pent-up resentment against the church. They have a lot to answer for in the shaping of this man's ferocious temper; his experiences at Gallipoli and in the trenches topped this up.

One by one the three brothers enlist and are chewed up by the killing machine on the Somme. There is no
Saving Private Ryan
here; two of the three brothers are killed, each at nineteen. The eldest, my future father-in-law, is disfigured by a burst of shrapnel in his face. The middle brother is killed at Pozières and the youngest, saddest of all because war is all he has known besides the orphanage, lives through every campaign until the last great battle in which the AIF is involved, that for Pèronne and, beyond it, the Hindenberg Line. Each battalion of the AIF is by now down from a thousand to about three hundred men. They are highly experienced and, some say,
mad with rage
when they launch the attack in which they capture Mt St Quentin. It is here that young Oscar Walker is gassed, dying five days later in a hospital at Rouen. There is no-one to receive this last telegram but their old Swedish father, now living in a boarding house in Glebe.

My mother-in-law has also lost two brothers, one in each war, and her story is just as tragic. She is one of twelve children. When the oldest of her brothers is killed in France in 1918, her mother gives exactly the same name, Joseph Young, to another baby boy born shortly afterwards. This is surely an unlucky choice, but to her the baby seems a gift from God, a replacement and compensation for his older brother lost in France. Young Joe is twenty-one when World War II breaks out and he is conscripted. He's among the undertrained militia who first meet the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail, and is killed there, somewhere in the jungle. To people like my parents-in-law the second war seems but an extension of the first, a continuation of the killing of young men, but much closer to home. One son is a prisoner of the Japanese, another, my husband, is in the Middle East and then New Guinea, and a third is in a tank regiment waiting to go overseas.