Roundabout at Bangalow (25 page)

This is a moment so transcendent that time stands still, the sun is arrested in the heavens and the earth swings on its axis, free of gravity and rational law. I wake to the conviction that the whole world has rotated beneath me, one hundred and eighty degrees on its axis, to mark the miracle of release. There is no greater surge of joy than that which comes with the first sight of one's own child. A deep wave of emotion, possibly the purest she'll experience in her life, moves the mother. A forefinger tenderly traces the eyebrow and searches for familiar patterns in the lineaments of brow-line, shape of the head, the lips, the feet and hands, so new yet already showing their genetic patterning. How much has come from genetic inheritance, how much will time and experience shape?

At this time I have the naive belief that each generation
will,
indeed
must
be an improvement on the last, that bad temper and depression will be bred out, that loving care and above all a respectable upbringing (I'm very keen on respectability) will ensure a successful outcome. But this child and the two who follow will be very much of their generation. The world they inherit will be that of the Vietnam war and its effects: anger, cynicism and the rejection of all values. Eighteen years later when conscription for Vietnam is decided by a lottery on television, by birth dates drawn from a barrel, this child will miss out by one day and, unlike his father and grandfather, will not go to war.

My husband chooses a name with a resounding ring which we hope will see him into noble manhood. It's the name of an old army mate, one who was not only a firm friend for five years, but also quite a larrikin. He kept the blokes in the same tent in stitches throughout the war. By now
the blokes in the same tent
have assumed mythic status, all seven foot tall, clever practical jokers with apocalyptic stories to share. Years later we encounter the original on Townsville station. He's on his way to Mount Isa, the refuge of many an estranged male, whether on the run from the police or the missus, and famous for its hard-drinking life and high wages, inflated by a bonus for working with lead. He is very drunk and doesn't seem to be seven foot tall. I take it that he's yet one more casualty of the recent war. Since then one of
the blokes
has gone mad and another has suicided. War wounds come in many guises, and the worst are not always the most visible.

This encounter happens on one of our typical outings during these years, a family trip to Townsville on the rail-motor with our next-door neighbours Sonia and Jack. These trips are usually fouled-up either by the men, or by the conditions of life here. The rail-motor takes several hours, puttering through a landscape scattered with reminders of the war: abandoned airfields with their rusting dumps of forty-four-gallon drums and a grove of coconut palms near the Stewart Creek gaol, many of them snapped off by Japanese bombs during the Battle of the Coral Sea. We arrive at eleven, take a taxi to the main street, abandon the babies (at this time I have two and Sonia four) at the council-run child-care centre, listen to a lecture from a permanently sour matron on the subject of dummies, run back down the stairs with outraged screams ringing in our ears, then prepare to systematically work through the shops.

The men repair to the Strand Hotel while Sonia and I buy hats (for these are still worn) and dress materials: silks, sea-island cottons and the newly released nylon. There is at this time a rumour that the photographic process, whose mysteries we don't fully understand, sees through the nylon: a woman photographed in a nylon dress will, we are told, be revealed in naked splendour. We take the chance. Designing my own clothes, cutting my own patterns, handling the beautiful materials and making them into garments that are unique, if sometimes bizarre, is my only creative outlet at this time.

Soon it's time to pick up the children, find the men and catch the rail-motor back in the early afternoon. There is obviously a downside to this whole day, but worse is the occasion when we go to Townsville with Jack and Sonia in his Customline, a long and rackety monster with exaggerated fins (this is before he shoots the children's dog). He's had a puncture on the way up and doesn't get it mended in Townsville because he's been delayed at the Strand Hotel. We set off back at night without a spare tyre along the coast road, an unfrequented track that follows the railway line, only to have another puncture in the middle of nowhere. The men go for help, walking miles back along the track to a lonely siding, breaking a window to reach the phone and ringing a taxi in Townsville to bring out a new tyre. It's just one more challenge to men who have faced Rommel's Afrika Korps, the Vichy French in Syria and the Japanese in the jungle. Meanwhile I walk the road for hours, my legs bitten up to the panty-line by swarms of mosquitoes, for I've put my skirt up over the baby to protect him from bites. This is called
giving the family a day out
and any woman who can't see the fun in it has
no sense of humour
(a familiar charge). It's little wonder that during my time in the north I become tighter lipped by the day.

My second baby is born at the end of 1953, just after the Queen's visit to Townsville, a spectacular occasion that occupies our minds for months. Schoolchildren are lined up in squads in the tropical sun to catch a glimpse of the royal limousine passing by, and an enthusiastic crowd of Italians and Spaniards from Ayr, their children waving Union Jacks, are determined to get as close as possible to their very own young and beautiful monarch. It's obvious that I can't go, but I listen eagerly to their breathless accounts. It's said that as the royal yacht
Britannia
berthed at the dock in Townsville the Duke, eager to show off his naval skills, personally threw the bowline with its lead weight to the wharf, almost decapitating the chief dignitary in the welcoming committee. This is almost certainly untrue but it makes a good story.

At this time, Christmas 1953, my mother has a terrible breakdown, the culmination of a lifetime of domestic tension, and scandalises my father's convivial family by (apparently) overdosing on Christmas Day, just before she is to join their family celebration in the beach house at New Brighton. After efforts to revive her in Mullumbimby and Lismore hospitals, she is transferred to the psychiatric ward in a major Brisbane hospital and given a course of shock treatment. At this time attempted suicide is a criminal offence, but charges can be avoided if the person is considered insane. For this reason suicide victims are, if possible, certified and committed to a mental institution. My mother is not insane, just at the very end of her tether, but will be permanently affected by the shock treatment. Meanwhile this baby, who weighed ten pounds and had a very difficult entry into the world, is not thriving, nor am I. My doctor advises me to keep right away from my family (he means forever) but I immediately hurry south to help my mother, convinced as always that it only needs more effort on my part and she'll get over her miseries.

When I arrive in Brisbane I take a taxi to the hospital, the driver warning me of the reputation for violence of this particular ward, and he's right. I find my mother sitting in a cane chair in a busy ward, confused about where she is but adamant that she didn't overdose intentionally. The ward lives up to the taxi driver's description. Opposite is a young woman trying desperately to garotte herself with the short length of cord lacing up the back of her chair. The nursing staff are blasée, timing their visits to her just as, tongue swollen and protruding, she is gargling and choking. They carefully remove the cord from her hands and re-knot it around the back. They obviously consider this a form of occupational therapy, a substitute for basket-weaving. Meanwhile a trolley is hurried past by ambulance men, on it an attempted suicide, bright blood soaking the cloth around a newly cut throat. I have a two-year-old clinging to my skirt and a heavy and very cranky baby. I go to the washroom to heat his bottle under the running water only to find that a patient has used the basin as a toilet, a great mess right under the tap. I have no choice; I avert my face, turn on the hot tap and warm the bottle. Outside at the bus-stop I run into my journalist suitor from eight years before. Now working on a Brisbane paper, he's visiting his wife in hospital with their new baby. He's shocked to see me there and no wonder: at twenty-six I'm a matronly frump lugging two frantic little kids. I could do without this encounter.

When my mother's released we take her for a holiday (I use the term loosely) to New Brighton near Billinudgel, the site of her girlhood romance — perhaps a misguided choice. Here my aunty has the holiday house that has been the site of many family dramas. The house is right on the beach but behind a terrace of sandhills. We are no sooner established than the 1954 cyclone, possibly the most destructive ever, sweeps in from the Pacific bringing mountainous seas which, for the first time in memory, wash right up over the terrace and down through the lower storey of the house and all the others on the beachfront. We're up to our knees in sea water in the kitchen. At the height of the cyclone the new jetty at the Bay is smashed to pulpwood and the fishing fleet, secured on top of it, is washed away, smashed up, and littered on the beaches from the Bay to the Queensland border. Meanwhile Lismore is flooded, the water reaching the first floor of the hotel occupied so recently by the Queen and her retinue, and raising the possibility, if it had happened a little earlier, of a constitutional crisis —
Careless colonials drown the Queen!

My problems are much simpler; a screaming baby, a mother who is almost catatonic with depression, and a husband and father who pal up and spend far too much time at Ma Ring's hotel at Billinudgel, another sacred site for the men in my family. The aged licensee repeatedly mistakes my father for his brother, a sergeant of police at Murwillumbah, and plies him with bottles of whisky. He doesn't argue. She even cooks, in the hotel kitchen, the roast he's been sent to buy for dinner so the truants can stay a few hours longer. This is known as a
family holiday,
and I'm more than relieved to get back to Rita Island where I can sort out the baby's problems (and mine). He had been put onto powdered cow's milk soon after birth and is apparently allergic to it. He can vomit up the whole contents of a bottle, then scream and scream for more. These screaming bouts accompany the visit to the hospital in Brisbane, the cyclone at New Brighton then the long trip home, after which the doctor changes him to goats' milk and he begins to thrive.

We've been in the north for five and a half years when there is a sudden change in our circumstances. Almost simultaneously we get the phone and electricity. I use my new toy to summon a truant home if he is late at the RSL Club, thus
spoiling a man's pleasure
, and to ring the doctor when the children have croup, choke on Pear's soap, eat cunjevoi, a poisonous rainforest lily, or drink turpentine — and they do all these things. They're quite friendly with the snakes in the backyard, even finding a nest of baby tiger snakes, but are not bitten. The electricity means not just lights and power points and an electric stove, but best of all a washing machine. No longer will I need to search for wood in the bush, drag it home and light the copper to wash the nappies. But to buy these things I need my own money, for we are still in debt to the Agricultural Bank, so I decide to go back teaching. I find a childminder, an islander named Joy — she always arrives with a hibiscus in her hair — and organise myself into the workforce.

The last half of 1955 finds me at the Home Hill Primary School, sampling the strange ways of the Queensland education system. The principal who welcomes me in the porch with the statement —
Some day we'll be able to manage without married women, but until then we'll have to put up with things as they are!
— obviously resents both married women teachers and those from the south. He directs me to sit at the back of a class for a week to watch a Queensland teacher do it the right way (I write long letters home). I'm then put in charge of over forty children in grade 1, there being no kindergarten class. There is no spare classroom, so the desks and blackboard are placed on the dirt under the school where the overflow from the bubblers at recess and lunchtime runs down under them and creates a muddy mess in which the children paddle their bare feet during the lessons. These children are supposed to be five years old, but some have been smuggled in at four and a half, and one of these has no English at all. Others have very little, for Home Hill is a heavily Italianised community.

The system is biased towards the three Rs and during this first year the children are supposed to reach the reading, spelling and arithmetic standards of New South Wales children at the end of grade 2. So we begin the day with spelling, reading and arithmetic, after recess we do more arithmetic, reading and spelling, and the same after lunch. Poetry, singing, drawing, dancing and games are the icing on the cake and there's little of it, for each Friday morning the principal, always on the alert for mistakes on my part, examines their books and tests all their work. This prescriptive regime might well explain the peculiar thinking of certain Queensland politicians — Joh? Pauline? — who've grown up with it. For me however this six months' work is solely a means to an end, to improve my home and cut down on domestic slavery.

At about this time, my father-in-law having died, my husband's mother urges us to return to Grafton and buy the family farm. The conditions on which we occupy our soldier settlement farm are that it cannot be sold for five years, and then only to a qualified ex-serviceman. We have been here almost six years and have cleared and planted about forty acres of cane; we have also installed two pumps for irrigation. In this area it's not simply a matter of clearing and planting; all the land has to be graded so that the water from the pumping point can run along the headland drains and into the furrows between the cane and so flood the field. Watering the cane is labour-intensive as, all day and sometimes well into the night, the pumps are pumping and water being redirected every couple of hours into a new set of drills. It's taken us six years to clear and grade to the stage we are at, and we haven't yet reaped the benefit of it, but we are both homesick and determine to go home.