Roundabout at Bangalow (4 page)

One afternoon a week we sew with the teacher's wife while the boys do woodwork. We make needle cases, hem handkerchiefs and eventually progress to a pillow case. The cotton is usually black from our sweaty hands and stiff with spit from the number of times we lick it to thread the needle. Everything we take home has to be boiled up in the copper to make it useable. I am eventually allowed to make a proper doll's dress, with finished off seams, with buttons and button-holes, but it isn't nearly as exciting as the glamorous, botched together creations I make at home. I am at this time sewing for my doll, from a scrap of sequined apricot silk stolen from an uncle's suitcase (probably a souvenir of some romantic conquest), a replica of the wedding dress worn by Princess Marina of Greece for her marriage to Prince George of Kent.

We are intensely interested in royalty. This is fostered by an article in the
School Magazine
on the royal family — King George V, Queen Mary and their numerous children from the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales down to the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester (later to be governor-general of Australia). There are also reverent articles in the magazines that come into the house — the
Woman's Mirror,
the
Home Journal,
and later the new and exciting
Women's Weekly
with its comic strip featuring Mandrake the Magician, his Nubian slave Lothar, and his girlfriend Princess Narda. Meanwhile we particularly love the little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, and send away for a cardboard cutout of their miniature thatched cottage in Kensington Gardens and carefully assemble it. These are not faraway strangers; though we children are sixth generation Australians they are our personal King, Queen and Princesses. When the
Northern Star
announces that King George V is dying, and suggests that his subjects pray for him, I am profoundly affected. I go out to the side of the house among the daisies where the dogs, Barney and Caesar, usually bed down. I kneel on the hard ground and pray to God, deeply and passionately, for my King's recovery, and I am personally affronted when he dies in spite of all my efforts.

The Depression has hardly touched this village, mainly because food is so plentiful — fresh milk and eggs, vegetables and fruit, homemade butter. There are people who are very well off, including the owner of the butcher's shop where my father works. He owns a
saloon
car with velour upholstery and velvet tassels at the side for the passengers to hold onto, quite a contrast to the Model T Fords and old lorries which usually rattle around the roads. The owner of the general store is also well off. He owns the only wireless, so the men go there to hear the test cricket broadcast from England. Economy is a way of life for everyone, not just the poor. There is no soap powder; rough soap is cut up into flakes to boil up with the clothes in the copper, and the copper stand is a forty-four-gallon drum with a hole cut in the side for the fire to be laid. Sugar bags are boiled until soft and hemmed to make bath mats. Flour bags are boiled in attempts to remove the brand, opened out and used to make
bloomers.
Many a little girl is branded across the backside with
Fielders Flour.
Gibson's Gift Tea labels are collected and traded for crockery, and bush furniture is constructed from kerosene cases. These cases are built of the finest white pine to contain two four-gallon tins of kerosene. The empty cases are stacked upon each other to the desired height, fastened together, then covered with cretonne. They are functional, look good, and cost next to nothing.

We do have some people from the outside world to remind us of the Depression. Our mother's parents, hard-hit, come to stay. Grandfather has been a blacksmith at Goolmangar and Bangalow. Now over fifty, he breaks stones on the road for the
relief,
the equivalent of work-for-dole today. He works in the vegetable garden and teaches us to sing:
In the Old Rock-Candy Mountains, Where they never change their socks.
Grandma teaches us our prayers —
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child
— and to say Grace. She is a health fanatic and we gag on her medications: codliver oil to prevent colds, sulphur and treacle every Saturday to cleanse the blood, and a mighty dose of castor oil periodically to clear out our systems.

Both our grandmothers are very religious, as many women were in those days. I realise now that it was up to them to carry the faith forward against the misbehaviour that was rife in the male population. In an attempt to forestall this, male children were taken to the Temperance Union by their mothers at fourteen to sign the Pledge … never to allow alcohol to pass their lips (I still have my father's certificate). Women like my Grandma, my mother's mother, are seekers after eternal truth. They long for some poetry in their lives, for some great and glorious salvation to make up for the sordid reality of this world. She began as a Presbyterian (hence our religion) but eventually found a haven with the Christadelphians, who believe that only one hundred and forty-four thousand, the number given in The Revelation of St John the Divine, will be saved on the last day, and all of them Christadelphians. Apocalyptic movements flourish in the Depression and their tracts, adorned with those terrifying figures, the Beast of Revelation and the Whore of Babylon, supposed to bring war and pestilence to the world in its dying days, are everywhere. Grandma's certainty of salvation, and her attempts to bring him to his religious crossroads, are the subject of Grandfather's derision.

He is an apostate from two faiths, Catholicism and Methodism, and is now a free thinker. His family history has been one of continual religious turmoil. In a sense his family are the equivalent of swinging voters. They turn from one side to another, not in any search for truth but more often through marriages where love or desire has overcome religious conviction. His mother, originally Methodist, has
turned
to marry a fascinating young Irishman, Michael Browne, to the indignation of her family. When Michael is struck by lightning just before her third child is born, literally blown out of his boots while ploughing the farm, she turns back to the Methodism of her family. Grandfather grows up between the two competing faiths, looking at first eagerly, then cynically, from one to the other. There is the faith of his uncles who own the pub at Ulmarra, who breed fine racehorses and win the Grafton cup more than once, go to mass, drink and gamble. These people are immensely attractive. Then there is the straitlaced faith of his mother, a reclusive martinet who takes in sewing to support her children. Grandfather is small and dark and Irish; he knows who he is. His sardonic commentary on the turn-the-other-cheek goodwill of the brethren is continuous. He drinks when he feels like it, bets on the horses and is almost a stranger in his own family. The atmosphere is tense and they soon depart to run a boarding house at Murwillumbah.

Our Granny (our father's mother) is also religious, but she is a passionate Anglican, a whole-hearted supporter of the Establishment. She endows the church with a cedar pulpit, buys an organ so her daughter can learn to play hymns at home, and
puts up
the Bishop when he comes to preach. She is also very comfortably off. She owns a large farm but lives in a small house on one corner of it and rents out the rest, including the eight-bedroom federation house that her Irish husband had built just before his death. The small house is called The Chalet and the large one, predictably, is Donegal. Both houses, five miles away from us and surrounded by beautiful gardens, are the centre of the family's social life and gossip. Granny is also a member of one of the old established families of the district. She tells us proudly and often that she is the daughter of Robert Scott Wotherspoon, for many years Mayor of Lismore, and the grand-daughter of an early Australian teacher and poet, Andrew Wotherspoon. A Scottish migrant, a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow and a friend of John Dunmore Lang, he was the first schoolmaster in Canberra (then Captain's Flat) and the second in Lismore, and was well known in both places as a fiery and quarrelsome lay preacher. His public arguments on matters of church doctrine with Campbell of Duntroon, the biggest landowner in the Molon-glo District, are a matter of public record. It is said that Campbell paid the fares of the family to transfer to Lismore, so anxious was he to be rid of the lot of them.

Aged eighteen, Alice Wotherspoon goes to an Orange Lodge picnic at Clunes, and meets our Grandfather, a migrant from County Donegal and a fervent member of the Lodge, with all its bigotry. They marry; he takes up a selection at Keerrong; they have ten children in eighteen years; he then dies of a heart attack. In the past thirteen years he has, with the help of Hindu labourers, ruthlessly cleared the rainforest from more than 150 acres, and these are the rich paspalum pastures which our Granny now owns, and lets out to tenant farmers.

Usually a sensible person, she has nevertheless absorbed from her father and husband a fierce and self-righteous intolerance. She had heard from her father an account of the Edith O'Gorman Riot in Lismore, when an
escaped nun
lectured the Protestants on the excesses (usually sexual) of that faith. A violent sectarian riot broke out in the street after the lecture and a number from each side were arrested and had to face the District Court in Grafton. Her father, according to our Granny, was not only acquitted, but most generously paid the fines of some of the
Roman Catholics
(she always gives them the full title). This made an enthralling tale for little girls held captive under the mosquito net in a high white bed with their Granny or Aunty Millie.

The knockout though, the real tear-jerker, is from a small book called
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.
This tells of a convent in Quebec where the nuns, innocent country girls, are enslaved, tortured and raped by lascivious priests, the resulting babies being strangled and thrown down a well. We have no idea how these babies come about, but thrill with horror at the dark convent circled around the well of death, the sneaking priests and the piteous little babies, and don't doubt the story for a moment. Years later I find a reference to this scurrilous book in Barbara Baynton's
Human Toll,
look for and find it in the Mitchell Library, and realise that it really exists, that it is not simply an invention of my Granny. Other sectarians (Baynton was a Presbyterian) have read it, believed it, and have no doubt also terrified their grand-daughters with it.

While my mother goes in for massed annuals, my Granny's garden is a projection of her extravagant nature; a profusion of climbing roses, wisteria, plumbago, may bushes, lasiandra, honeysuckle and, most dear to me, the jasmine. This is the poet's jasmine, originating in Arabia and Spain and grown in the South of France as the basis for the most delicate perfumes. It is common in old gardens in the colonial cities of the far North Coast of New South Wales, and now haunts the Australian night with its fragrance. A cloud of it shelters the front verandah of this house under the bullnose iron, and beneath it grow freesias and shivery grass. Our Granny is the old lady of the garden; all plants flourish for her. Cuttings pushed into the rich soil strike for her, thrive, bloom and reproduce themselves everywhere. This garden is an emblem of continuity. Grown from cuttings from her mother's and aunts' gardens and from those of neighbouring farms, it carries the genes of the old garden favourites down through time. The riotous garden is a paradise for children, from the old seagrass chairs under the giant jacaranda tree, to the boxes of shells under the house, collected at the beach to be glued to picture frames, or fastened around a crocheted milk-jug cover.

This household not only exists in the present, it is continuous with the past, like a ship that sails through time with its living freight, its totem objects and its family lore. We are shown the round table, its top pit-sawn from one slab of red cedar by our Granny's uncle Oliver Jones, a famous shipwright at Coraki (it is now in a museum). There are the bedspreads crocheted by her mother from heavy cream cotton, the patterns (for instance the ‘wheatsheaf') centuries old, and the tinted portraits of her family behind convex glass in heavy oval frames. More important perhaps is the intangible past, the stories brought from Ireland by her husband: of an ancestor who married the daughter of the Bishop of Londonderry during the siege; from these illustrious loins (that is the Bishop's) we are descended and must never forget it; or of the distant relationship to those heroines of the Irish resistance, Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewitz (good Protestant girls, according to our Granny, and certainly no revolutionaries).

There are stories too of the more immediate past: of coming as a young and gently reared bride to the Keerrong valley, then clothed to the tops of the hills with the impenetrable rainforest; of carrying the washtub down to the creek each afternoon to wash the clothes in the sweet water beneath the wild cherry trees; of being accosted by wandering Aborigines and disarming them with gifts of food while her little children hid under the bed; or of the terrible day in 1914 when her husband lay dead and her youngest child was not yet born. These stories, true or half-true, are myths of their origins for the listening children, marking them out as special, particular, set apart from the ordinary people of the race. Fifteen years ago, in Ireland, I was able to verify the connection with the Gore-Booths, but the descent is from the Dean of Londonderry not the Bishop — such inflation is typical of family stories.

This house is always busy with the coming and going of family and neighbours; it is redolent with the smells of cooking and alive with contending emotions, for life here is lived at a passionate level of affection, gossip, recrimination, indignation and reconciliation. The peach trees come right up to the kitchen window and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine fills the air. The possums play in the peach trees and come into the roof at night, peeing down through the ceiling. Huntsman spiders scuttle on the ceiling at night, or hide behind the amateurish oil paintings of Highland cattle or flamingoes standing in lily ponds, the relics of the genteel pursuits of long-dead great-aunts. The children are safe, though, beneath the snowy mosquito nets. By day they sit on the bench below the casement windows and listen in on the latest family drama. They can see for miles down through a paddock that is halfway between rainforest and pasture. This is the graveyard of the rainforest, caught at a stage between that primal Eden and the featureless pastures of the dairy farms around. The stumps, some of them six foot high, now stand in the harsh glare of midsummer, some colonised by strangler figs and passion vines. Inkberries and cape gooseberries flourish along with stinging nettles and Paterson's curse, lush green grass and arrogant weeds. Aunty Millie cries
Sookie, Sookie, Sookie
and bangs the bucket and the jersey cow runs to be milked. Granny puts out a saucer of milk for the black snake. Uncle Walter lies in wait, seizes it by the tail when it comes to drink and cracks its head on the tank stand. The children greedily eat peach pie swamped in yellow cream, or steal biscuits from the biscuit tin with the Rosella parrot on the side behind the kitchen door.