Roundabout at Bangalow (29 page)

I don't, in my stilted letters to my father, tell him anything of this; to do so would suggest blame, and it's not as simple as that. Her spiral lasts, in different flats and houses, sometimes improving for a couple of years then regressing, until she goes into a nursing home twenty-three years after he leaves and eleven years after his death. Only then can I pass most of the responsibility over to others. I don't begrudge him his happiness, but things could have been very different had they resolved their differences twenty, or even thirty, years earlier; she could perhaps have made a life of her own. Now in meatworks in Burnie and Launceston he reverts to the lowest level of work, doing an extra job at night to send the money to support her. He comes home at sixty-three and buys his own place, seven acres on a quiet creek in the hinterland behind Ballina. He dams the creek and makes a swimming pool, labels all the trees in the patch of rainforest along the creek, ploughs up an acre of rich red soil, plants his fruit trees and vegetables, and then he dies.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of him in one or other of his grandsons: in the unguarded line of a profile on this one, in the way the hair grows thick and unruly on another, or in a familiar flash of bad temper from any one of them. But most of all I remember him by his hands. His hands were square and strong. They were gnarled as tree trunks, toughened by work. They earned the bread for other people for fifty years without faltering. They grubbed lantana up Terania Creek at fourteen, shovelled gravel at The Pocket and shore the sheep at Minnie Downs. They lifted the heavy bags of wheat and lumped them across the railway platform at Wallangarra. They sliced the meat and made the sausages on innumerable blocks in country butcher shops.

But life was not all work. These are the hands that snatched the football from the air and scored the winning try just before the final whistle, rigged up lures for unlucky fish from the Bay to the trout streams of Tasmania and, wherever he was, planted his thousands of tomato and lettuce plants, pressing them carefully down into the loose and fertile dirt. And then they were still.

Down by the Salley Gardens

I am thirty-eight years old. I sit at a small table in front of the window overlooking the creek and begin the first essay of my university study. The time is now ripe; my youngest child is eight and my husband is working away from home, sometimes for ten days at a time. I teach school during the day but my nights are lonely. I place a neat stack of typing paper beside the portable Olivetti typewriter which I bought to do the minutes for the Young Wives Club, take a deep breath and begin, tentatively, to do what I've longed to do for twenty years. This is the first of thirteen assignments in English I, and is an analysis of Yeats's poem ‘A Prayer for my Daughter'. I know of Yeats from my Palgrave's
Golden Treasury,
a prize from the Presbyterian Assembly for learning a chapter of St Paul's
First Letter to the Corinthians
by heart. It's been my constant companion since, but the only Yeats poems in it are a couple of simple lyrics concluding with my favourite, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens':

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

This is no preparation for the complexity of ‘A Prayer For my Daughter' and, as far as my studies go, or anything else for that matter, I've no intention of
taking life easy.
Rather the opposite: I'll soon become so obsessed that all my previous dreams — of building a tropical paradise on a soldier-settler farm, or of quiet prosperity on the peninsula — will be supplanted by this one.

At this time we are supposed to look at a poem as a work of art, almost a painting in words, and we concentrate not only on its meaning, but also on the poet's amazing skill with words, the way he's able to play upon the emotions of the reader. This approach is now considered old-fashioned, but I'm good at it, for it requires those patterning skills I mentioned earlier, the ability to see relationships, to make connections. Overdoing it, as I will always do, I study everything I can find about Yeats, feel an instant empathy with him and discover that my Irish heritage is very close to his. Years later when I go to Ireland to study Irish literature I find that the inner walls of Drumcliff Church, where Yeats is buried and where his grandfather was rector, are lined with marble memorials to dead members of my family, and many of them are buried there (around the back, away from the tourist coaches). If I'm an Irish Protestant (by descent) and so, I suppose, something of an outcast in the Republic of Ireland, I might as well have a few monuments to establish my identity, to tell me where I came from.

From then on every essay becomes an exhilarating trial and its completion a triumph. The approach to literature at the time is chronological so, in a daze of delight, I work my way through
Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Chaucer, Spenser and Donne and through the Romantic poets to the Moderns. And that's just the poetry; there are novels and plays as well. I go to my first weekend school at Sydney University and for the first time step inside its sandstone colonnades, trodden by the feet of generations of students, not to mention literary figures like Christopher Brennan. Sacked from the university for a certain lack of decorum (drunkenness and incontinence), Brennan rivalled the European Symbolists in his poetry, not to mention the flamboyant details of his life.

I feel totally overawed by the other students, especially young women who take it as their right, and the most natural thing in the world, to immerse themselves in study, sometimes for a lifetime of one course after another, just for the sake of learning. There's also the other extreme: next to me sits a self-assured middle-aged woman who questions one of the tutors provocatively. Later she will progress to a love affair with him and boast about it. I'm amazed at her open flouting of the conventions. Nothing has prepared me for this. These people seem sophisticated, bohemian and beyond my reach, for even the cappuccino that we share in Glebe Point Road is new to me. The tutor who marks my assignments, and whom I've visualised as a scholarly young Don from Oxford or Cambridge, turns out to be an elderly South African with gravy stains on his tie who shuffles about the lecture room in carpet slippers. Is this what university life is like? I'm quite overwhelmed.

At this time the University of New England leads the world in Distance Education. The courses are highly organised, the principle being that External students should have access to the same lectures, the same teaching material, as those in residence. As two thirds of the students in the Arts Faculty are studying at a distance, and most of these are teachers, residential schools are held during the school vacation, where all the lectures for the year are crammed into two weeks. These schools are among my richest experiences. I never forget the rush of adrenalin that overcomes me when I first step into the Arts building, each room like a cell in a honeycomb filled with learning, or into the library where the very smell of the books, let alone their contents, fills me with rapture. This is not just the background to my life, it becomes the very essence of it; two thirds of my degree — the maximum allowed — is taken up with the study of literature. I skip the Jacaranda Festival to study, for the exams are always the week after it, sit for exams year after year in the enervating heat of church halls in Grafton and South Grafton, wait for my results the week before Christmas and, exhilarated anew, begin in the new year the reading for the next courses. Soon I do two a year.

While this is absorbing my inner life there are practical changes. My husband, after the big flood which put our lives in danger, has determined to sell the farm, his decision reinforced by an accident when his big Massey Harris tractor, the pride of the farm, burns. It's a fiery December day, the grass as dry as tinder, and he's been ploughing near the barn. He comes home at midday, leaving the tractor in the field. We casually look up after lunch to a riveting sight: our tractor engulfed in flames. The shiny disc of the plough has caught and concentrated the sun's rays onto the grass around the tractor. The grass has burst into flames which soon spread to the massive tyres. The tractor is framed in a blazing aureole. We ring the fire brigade and in the meantime organise a bucket chain from the tank to the fire, more than two hundred yards away. My husband, calm as usual and strong enough for two, strips the burning tyres off their rims with a shovel and so saves the tractor itself. I begin to wonder whether our bad luck, nine floods and now fire, will ever be over.

Once we leave I refuse to revisit the Peninsula, and the farmhouse there becomes the second of those from which, in my mind, I've been dispossessed. I dream of it constantly and always as it was. But in all my dreams I'm an intruder, floating disembodied through the rooms, terrified that the
real
owners will return and cast me out with cruel words about
trespass
and
property.
The fact is that the old house is now unrecognisable. The Flood Mitigation Authority has at last raised the levee banks that protect South Grafton and this throws a much greater volume of floodwater back onto the Peninsula. I hear that, in recompense, the Authority has paid to raise each house by over a metre. So the old farmhouse is now off its brick foundations, perched like an ungainly box high on steel poles. The solid flights of stairs front and back, designed by my husband to link shady verandahs with gardens and lawns, in perfect proportion with the house, have been replaced by the cold steel rungs of what look like the galley-ways on a ship. The creek has been silted up by another thirty years of floods, and waterlilies no longer float on its surface. The truth is that the homes of my childhood and married love, including the gardens that I planted and tended myself, no longer exist. They will live on only in the imagination and memories of those who shared them.

Why she is as she is

She doesn't enter the nursing home willingly. Early on she threatens suicide, to throw herself off the Grafton Bridge. Knowing she can't get past the front desk, I tell her it's her decision, something I didn't dare tell her twenty years earlier. She writes, in her beautiful copperplate handwriting, to the Minister for Health asserting that her daughters have imprisoned her against her will, and demands release. He sends the local Member of Parliament to investigate. She weighs six stone, can hardly stand, and obviously can't care for herself, but she's still defiant. She writes to the Department of Health complaining that she doesn't get enough vegetables. They investigate the food situation at the nursing home and are more than satisfied. But she gets an abundance of vegetables from then on. She decides to stay and does, for another thirteen years.

I visit her one day about a year before she dies. I'm bored, the day is hot and I'm trying not to look at my watch. She's shuffling through old photos. I pick up a portrait of her grandparents, her mother's parents. Her grandfather, that Soldier of the Empire, veteran of the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the Maori Wars, is standing straight, a gold Albert chain looped across his chest. His long-suffering wife is seated, composed, her face as yet untouched by cancer. I comment that he seems to have been a fine upstanding man.
He was nothing of the sort,
she says and tells me matter-of-factly how, when she was four, and a number of times after that, he looked carefully around to make sure no adult was watching, took her by the hand and led her away …

For forty or fifty years she's been telling doctors and psychiatrists of the
tragedies of her life,
her other grandfather struck by lightning, her dead sister, her early and disastrous marriage,
the reasons why she is as she is,
but she's never mentioned this. Now she passes it over to me in an aside, as if it were just one more of the old photos she's handling, or an interesting clipping from the
Daily Examiner.
She goes on shuffling the photos.

The honeycomb

I complete my BA degree while teaching high school and looking after three children who, during this time, become teenagers. Only the night hours, after they finish their homework, belong to me. Here all petty and mundane difficulties disappear as I enter the world of the midnight scholar. Reference books, sacred tomes full of exciting and fabulous ideas, are spread out around me. I absorb them, possess them, and use them as the building blocks for essays into which I pour all of my own thoughts and feelings. Five years of my middle age stream out behind me as, in the midnight hours, I traverse new territories, undertake new adventures and, at the end of my first degree, begin the most exciting adventure of all. I'm awarded a number of prizes and scholarships, but all with strings attached, all dependent on my going into residence to do an honours year, something which can't be done externally. It's all or nothing.

This will be difficult, but the professor of English persuades the principal of one of the women's colleges to offer me a place as a college tutor. As a college flat goes with the tutorship, they decide that my daughter, now fourteen, can come as well: my older children are, at this time, at university and teachers college respectively. From now until my retirement I'll inhabit two worlds, a foot in each, moving between the mellow cloisters of the university, the silent carpeted library, my own cell in the honeycomb of learning, and the steamy sauna on the coast, the stew of family emotions centred on my mother. I soon become adept at separating the two and almost change personality as I descend or ascend the ranges.

My husband supports my decision to go into residence and we agree on a plan to alternate weekends together, in one place or the other. For us this works well, right up to his retirement some six years later, and he will often, but not always, enjoy the new world as much as I do. Only the Presbyterian minister at Grafton, forgetting the parable of the talents, disapproves. During the Sunday service, the week before I leave, he actually asks the congregation to join him in praying for the welfare of my children in what he speaks of as
the difficult times ahead of them.
This pronouncement marks my definitive break with organised religion: from now on I'll pursue a more solitary path.