Roundabout at Bangalow (26 page)

Before we leave however we experience the big cyclone of 1956 which crosses the Queensland coast almost overhead, flattening houses and cane fields and tearing the wheels off windmills. The winds, estimated at 130 miles an hour, beat up against Castle Hill in the centre of Townsville then divide and meet again on the other side, trashing everything in their path. Wooden beams and sheets of corrugated iron fly through the air like paper. Telephone poles on the line between Ayr and Townsville, made of steel as thick as railway lines (white ants eat wooden poles) are found with five complete turns in them: the winds have twisted them like corkscrews. Our only casualty, besides field after field of flattened cane, is the twelve-foot fan on the windmill which lies smashed on the ground twenty feet away. Over the next few days LF straightens the pieces, bolts them together, then climbs the ladder to the top of the mill with the heavy wheel roped to his back and, all alone, re-attaches it. This is a tremendous feat, not only of strength, said to have been inherited from his Swedish grandfather, but of independence, for he won't ask for help from anyone.

I leave Ayr on the Douglas DC3 in March 1956. The two children, aged four and two, are with me; my husband is to bring the car loaded with our special possessions and join us in Brisbane. The plane leaves the airfield and banks over Rita Island so that I get a bird's-eye view of what has been my island home. There is the box-like house in its clearing with its brave little garden, its tractor shed and windmill. Close to it a cane fire has once more escaped and is roaring through the long grass towards the mud and mangroves where it will exhaust itself. It has already caught the posts of a particularly cantankerous neighbour's fence and they are burning fiercely. From the air this seems trivial, but the lawyers will be busy with it for years, perhaps for a lifetime. I feel a wave of exultation as the plane turns south and flies at five thousand feet, no more, right down the length of the Great Barrier Reef and into Brisbane. I'm going home and I don't look back.

My father-in-law's story

The land we are about to buy, on a peninsula in the Clarence River, is family land, the connection going back to the early years of the twentieth century. It's 1908 and my father-in-law is fourteen when he first comes to the farm he will eventually own. Although baptised Edward Henry von Wolcker he is now known as Eddie Walker. He was named Edward after his grandfather Edvard Anders von Wolcker, who once owned the manor house Eckholmen in Varmland, and Henry after his father Hjalmar, who is now known as Harry Walker. Half Irish, half Swedish, he is an unusual hybrid in a nation of hybrids. He will always be an outsider, always slightly foreign.

He has been sent from Kincumber Orphanage to St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, reputedly to train as a priest. He jumps the fence, as he puts it, and joins his Swedish father in a boarding house in Glebe. When two sisters in the medieval robes of Mary MacKillop's Sisters of St Joseph, hands folded in their sleeves, come looking for him, determined to take him back, he runs in fear. He must get as far away as possible, far beyond the reach of the
brown Joeys.
For the rest of his life these bat-like figures, always in pairs, will turn up from time to time, imploring him to return to the Church. They will show up, still entreating, at his deathbed.

He sees an advertisement for a farm boy on the distant Clarence River and stows away on an NCSN ship, hiding inside a coil of rope. He climbs the bank from the wharf and meets the farmer at the Crown Hotel at the end of Prince Street, directly opposite the picnic ground on Susan Island. He surveys the unfamiliar streetscape: the long skirts of the women brushing the scarcely dry flood mud as they stroll from shop to shop, hansom cabs lined up for hire and a bullock team, incongruous against the stately colonial banks, dragging its freight of logs along the street to the wharf. He is hired as a farmhand for a farm on the peninsula and is told to get out there straight away and start work. The peninsula, about three miles long and half a mile wide at most, lies between the Clarence and an anabranch known as Carrs Creek. Seen from the air in modern times it's obviously part of the river rather than the land, one of the first parts to drown when the river rises and pulls the peninsula under, with its farms and crops and people and animals, and holds it there for a couple of days or more, as long as it suits.

Seen from the air the peninsula looks like a leaf floating on the river, the point downstream in the current, the single gravel road the central rib and the leaf stem attaching it to the mainland upstream at a place appropriately called the Washout. When the river in flood reaches eighteen feet it pours over this narrow stem and the peninsula then becomes an island as much at the mercy of the water as the flotsam and jetsam on its surface: vast rafts of water hyacinth, drifting logs, the occasional dead dog or cow. In summer the leaf shape is deep green with maize, a chlorophyll factory; in autumn it's clothed in mature corn, gold for the picking, much of it pulled down, smothered and festooned with the most marvellous blue and purple convolvulus.

Eddie Walker walks the miles from Grafton through corn fields and cow paddocks and meets the creek near where the derelict Peters ice-cream factory now stands. He borrows a boat, rows himself across and begins his promenade of the peninsula which will become the focus of all his future longings, all his land hunger. The first farm he walks through belongs to a family of bachelors and spinsters who live there intact for half a century, unable to marry and almost too shy to speak to one another. Then, walking hard, he comes to a farm as old as the world: grey homestead, barn and outbuildings from hewn timber sinking into and merging with the rich earth. Here lives a patriarch with his numerous family, huge barns chockful of pumpkins, squash and gramma, cows feeding along the creek bank, young women milking the cows and cooking, young men working the earth and children underfoot — a world which is totally self-sufficient. He then comes to the farm on which he is to work: up with the morning star to feed the horses, picking corn into a horse-drawn dray for ten hours a day, husking corn in the barn at night and eating rough — corned beef and damper — then abrupt dismissal when the year's corn is picked and in the barn.

The patriarch finds him walking back down the peninsula, homeless and crying like the child he still is. He takes him home and treats him like a member of the family. One more makes no difference. The hessian mattresses are filled freshly each year with shredded corn husks, the blankets are corn bags covered with cretonne, the famous colonial
wogga rugs.
There is plenty of work, plenty of food but no pay, for money is almost irrelevant here. He thrives with this family and grows strong; at sixteen he goes cane-cutting downriver in the cane-fields around Harwood sugar mill, but still the peninsula is the image in his mind of peace and prosperity — the cornucopia of the river land.

He meets Joe Young, his first real friend since leaving the orphanage. They cut cane together around Chatsworth Island until 1914, then go to Brisbane to enlist, thinking this war will be quite a lark. They are both nineteen when they land at Gallipoli and in 1916 go together to France. He comes back to Chatsworth Island, the left side of his face disfigured, and in 1918 marries Joe Young's sister. Joe is lost in the battle of Le Hamel. With two brothers and a brother-in-law dead on the Somme, his best memories are tied up with the peninsula.

He returns to the peninsula in 1928, having made his money on a succession of farms commencing with the soldier-settlement block on Turkey Island. He buys the farm he first worked on as a fourteen-year-old, and then the one next to it. He is now a substantial man of property and, more importantly, the river is kind to him. There are no floods from 1928 until 1943, and in this time he builds a grand house on the bank overlooking a brimming reach of the creek, its surface almost covered with purple waterlilies. Its style is proudly federation and its cool verandahs look out over the water. He plants an orchard, including the pecan tree which later forms an umbrella over the lives of the family, and, most daring for one so frugal, buys a car. Six years later his youngest son is born, the only one not named after a dead or disfigured member of the first AIF but doomed nonetheless. Then comes the second war.

Another story:
It is 1917. Recuperating in England from the reconstruction of his face and jaw, Eddie Walker is given leave to visit his dead mother's family in Tipperary. This Catholic family is still seething over wrongs both recent and ancient: the failure of the Easter rebellion the year before and the savage executions of its leaders by the British, and also the
fields
they lost in the British land-grabs of the 1850s, straight after the famine. The farm, now owned by his mother's only brother, an elderly bachelor, is still substantial, with a long, low, thatched dwelling house, barns and byres. There is no heir and his uncle tries to persuade him to bury his Australian uniform, masquerade as an Irishman, melt into the disaffected Catholic population and inherit the farm. Though tempted he refuses, perhaps repelled by the tribalism of the Irish, perhaps averse to deserting his mates in the trenches. It's a long way to Tipperary, in more ways than one, for an Australian digger. The seventy-year-old uncle then marries a young woman and fathers two sons.

And a worse one:
In the mid-1930s he receives an unsigned letter from England. It is tattered, travel-stained and incoherent. It has been redirected several times, from the boarding-house in Glebe where his Swedish father used to live, to Chatsworth Island and then, by someone who knows his whereabouts, to the farm on the peninsula. It's a cry for help from someone who is obviously half-mad. To follow it up he would need to find the money to go to England and track down the sender, yet he is haunted by the fear that this letter might be from his younger brother, listed as
missing
after the battle of Pozières in 1916, then automatically pronounced
killed in action
at the end of that year. Perhaps he still lives, incarcerated in some institution in England, perhaps faceless or blind, perhaps hopelessly crippled, yet longing every hour to be found and brought home. My father-in-law does nothing, but thinks about it a lot.

Pillars of fire

The creek in front of the farmhouse floats in its own light. It's the home of snake and platypus, fringed with hyacinth, afloat with the blue cups of the lotus flower. Sacred kingfishers dip into its waters and ibis stalk its banks. The waterbirds of the world choose it: the pelicans, the jabiru and the colony of black swans who nest alongside the Washout. The swans dip down towards the surface of the creek at sundown, coming home to rest. Occasionally the wings of a swan tip both wires of the power lines over the creek, fusing all the lights in the house as the big bird drops like a stone into the water. Eels and catfish live in the depths among the fleshy stems of the waterlilies, a submarine forest with the same bloodthirsty rules as the rainforest on the island
.

The eels not only make war on their own kind, they also tear the webbed feet off any domesticated ducks crazy enough to venture into the creek. Eels and catfish are considered vermin, unfit to be eaten. The catfish, fat and pallid creatures with poisonous whiskers, mewl and squeak as fishermen spike them through their bony skulls then throw them up onto the grass to bleed and die. At dusk the fruit bats from the island dip down to the surface to sip the water then undulate on their way. At dawn it's not unusual to look down on the creek from a front bedroom window and see a fishing boat rocking on the surface in the grey light, netting the creek for mullet, bream and an occasional small shark. Some mornings the house floats on the mist like a ship at sea until the mist gradually disperses, bringing us back to earth
.

One of the first things I do when we arrive is to open a door from the back verandah into the lounge-room; a door which has been locked for almost thirty years. This creates a new breezeway from one end of the house to the other and will hopefully clear out the ghosts of old memories and make way for a new family. No more will those spectral figures from the Somme stand by the pianola as it grinds out
It's a long way to Tipperary,
for the pianola has gone to town with the old people. Instead little children will, for the first time for twenty years, play around the wide verandahs, learn to swim in the creek, play with miniature tractors and farm machinery in the dirt under the house and swing from the overhanging pecan tree. I then claim the garden as my own, planting all the old familiar flowers from my Granny's garden, the may bush, the jasmine, the wisteria, the buddleia and the black boy roses. The peach trees are fruiting when we arrive and I beat the flying foxes to the peaches, making pies and preserves, using the big fuel stove, establishing my place.

We arrive just after a flood, and its debris — tree branches, sticks and rubbish bound together with mud — is heaped up against all the fences and even the piles of the house. LF drags the lot together and lights it at dusk. This pillar of fire will also sweep away the past. The inferno rages, lighting up the sky to the north-west of the city and astonishing its people. A fire brigade comes out looking for the source and reprimands the arsonist, but he plays by his own rules (as always) and is set on making a clean sweep. He then raises the rooftree on a big and airy barn on the upriver side of the house, just beyond and sheltered by the pecan tree. If there are any more floods (and we don't believe there will be) this will break the force of the water and debris, leaving the house in calm water. Soon an intricately patterned carpet snake, probably washed down from the rainforest in the last flood, makes its home on a rafter just over the tractor, its whole length folded carefully, fluid coil upon coil. Its head, sleek as a dog's, is carefully arranged on top of the folds, yellow eyes watchful. We soon find out where it goes at night when we hear it slithering up between the wall plates into the space above the ceiling where it kills, with much thumping and high-pitched squealing, any mouse or rat unfortunate enough to be there. Later a colony of white ants invades for a time the same wall through a carelessly placed buddleia branch. These are a part of the teeming secret life of the peninsula. We are never alone.

Beside the road that runs up the centre of the peninsula and bisects the farm is the original barn and the ruins of an old house, totally covered with a yellow flowering vine known as
cats' claw
and sheltered by a magnolia tree as old as the farm itself. Each magnolia flower is as big as a plate with a central stamen crusted with pollen; their perfume is as cloying as the past. We clamber on rotting joists, feeling our way through the dark interior, trying to imagine the constricted life once lived in its hot little rooms, their walls still pasted with scraps of wallpaper, roses and violets, on a backing of hessian and newspapers, the colonial way of papering a house. This house represents the past of the farm, long before my father-in-law worked there as a boy, back beyond memory to the cedar-cutters and small selectors who cleared this place in the 1850s.