Roundabout at Bangalow (9 page)

Well old girl I am going to the bush today and I am going to make some money for you. I am going fencing by contract so that the harder I work the more money I will get … In this work a man is likely to knock up a cheque of 40 or 50 pounds a month so I think it is better to stop a while longer instead of coming home to work on wages and always be in debt … We are camped 6 miles off the road and 36 miles from town. The night we went out we carried our swags that 6 miles through the bush in the dark but when we got to the camp they had a big pot of Kangaroo tail soup so we had a crack at that and it wasn't too bad either
…
dont lose any sleep about me as I am camped out in the bush with 5 other blokes and the only other faces we see is bloody kangaroos and dingoes
.

A month later he at last gets a job as a shearer at Minnie Downs, about 150 miles from Charleville. He promises to be home in about six weeks and, full of optimism, has ordered new clothes to be ready so that he can leave as soon as the shed is cut out
(the arse is out of my good trousers and my coat is falling to pieces)
.

… at last I have got what I came here for and as soon as the shed cuts out I am coming home for sure. It will be at least six weeks maybe a little longer but if you still want me to come home you can look forward to seeing me soon. There are 43,000 sheep there for 8 shearers at £2.5 per 100 so make that up and you will have an idea what sort of a cheque I will fetch home with me
…
the good shearers here do 200 a day so you can imagine the money they make
.

Nine o'clock and all lights out. Every shearer catch a rousabout. That is what they say in the sheds so I ought to be alright if that is the case
…

Five weeks later he explains with some indignation why he hasn't yet sent any money home:

The reason why I havent been sending you any money is that we are shearing by contract and I cant get my bloody cheque until we are finished what we are signed on for now. You will say that this is a B. lie but I will enclose my agreement for you to see for yourself. I will explain the situation as well as possible for you. This country is under a 3 years drought at present and the Minnie Downs sheep are all over the country on agistment. There are about 23,000 here at the homestead where we are shearing now and we expect to finish them next week. Then I will get paid for my share of that issue. You can expect a few pound in about a fortnight from now … After that we go to another place near Charleville for a week and then there are 5,000 more at another place near Augathella. After that goodbye to this drought stricken bloody Barstid of a country.

Then there is a succession of mishaps:

We were off work nearly all last week on account of dust storms. You cant imagine what it is like here in windy weather. Everything is full of dust including your mouth eyes nose and arse and you cant see more than 100 yards either way
…

We had to knock off shearing at Minnie for a week but we expect to go back tomorrow. It rained like hell for 2 days so that buggered things up for a week as there is no chance of shearing wet sheep … One team of shearers not far from here went on with the wet sheep and there is 5 out of 8 of them in the hospital now. They say it is the fumes of the wet wool that does it … I have had very bad eyes lately it is a kind of a blight that is going about, every body has it
.

In mid-October, two months after he goes to Minnie Downs and about the time he is supposed to send a few pound home, he writes that he has been seriously ill for a fortnight with an influenza which has killed seven in Charleville during the preceding four days.
It is the same sickness as when the black flu was going around because everybody goes completely black when they die.
The shearing team has gone on to another shed without him, he hasn't his fare to go home, and says he is too weak to work:

I always was lucky but since I came out here I have had an overdose of good luck. I know what you will say when you read this
‘Bloody Liar' but I would like you to see me now. I havent had a shave for nearly a week and I weigh about 10 stone at the outside
…
I wont write any more now because my back and head is aching like buggery but I will let you know as soon as I get something
…
The Doctor told me not to get up for another week but I cant do that
…
I will have to have a go at whatever I can get until I get my fare home again

The pressure on him from his wife, his mother and older brothers intensifies. He is bombarded with letters and the crucial telegram with the story that my sister is ill. He replies with a telegram —
Cant come yet will write immediately
— then another letter:

I couldnt possibly come home until I am sure that it has left me because I would look nice if I carried the sickness down there and some of them got it and died
…
I am starting work to-morrow in the railway yard shovelling coal. I dont know how long I will last for I can hardly walk but I will try and stick it for a while
.

He returns home after six months' absence. The next year the Christian Brothers try to get him back to Charleville, but he doesn't return to what he calls
that barstid of a place.
I'm still no closer to knowing whether he deserted my mother (and me) but try to excuse him on the grounds of his extreme youth and resentment at being caged up too soon. Nevertheless I wonder whether his absence is the cause of my mother's lifelong instability and fear of being abandoned. Or does it merely intensify what was already there?

I think of this as I stand, more than seventy years later, on the Tuntable Creek bridge, below the butter factory at The Channon, and gaze down into the peaty rapids boiling over the rocks and hidden snags, or into the shadows under the she-oaks. The creek changes from moment to moment. Strange currents and eddies stir the spiralling weed, sediments shift and settle. The creek won't give up its meaning, just as the traces of the past — the expression on a face in a fading sepia photograph, yellowing newspaper clippings, old letters, family stories — give only glimpses of the truth. My own memories are probably more accurate than any of these, so I'll return now to my own story, re-entering it at the point where our family leaves The Channon for Wallangarra.

The Tableland

The autumn of 1936 finds us in an old motor lorry, trundling with all our possessions up the gravel road from Lismore to Casino to Tenterfield and then Wallangarra. We are wild with excitement, not realising that our lives are about to change completely, for we are now flotsam on the dark tide of the Depression, as helpless as all the other human debris of the thirties. From this time until war breaks out in 1939 we are wanderers, settling for a time, going to new schools, then, as the Depression deepens and my father loses his job again, we are cast out, usually without warning, and must begin again in another town.

During this period we live in four rented houses and a beach camp before we finally settle. Our first move, to Wallangarra, takes us from the most lush and beautiful scenery in Australia to a barren little town of rickety weatherboard houses leaning in against the wind. Its dusty lanes, which double as stock routes, are lined with pepperina trees. This is a different Australia, the gaunt, pared-down Australia of a Drysdale painting. We explore the countryside at once, wandering far over the paddocks but finding only eroded gullies littered with rusty tins, clumps of blackberries, and the yellow mullock heaps left by disappointed tin-miners. In place of friendly cows there are stupid-eyed sheep. Nothing else moves on the dry ground but a few scavenging goats and a thousand rabbits. Monotonous gum trees are draped with mistletoe and the wide skies stretch to the horizon. We dodge the rabbit burrows and old mine shafts, or sit in boredom by the railway line, watching the trains go toiling through the cutting. We buy a tin of sardines from the Chinese corner store and grease the rails with sardine oil hoping at the very least to derail the train. This fails. The driver waves merrily to what he sees as a group of innocent children, the train grinds on its way and the endless monotony closes in behind it.

Wallangarra sits astride the border of New South Wales and Queensland, one foot in each state and divided in two by the border fence. This is a rabbit-proof fence, the first I've seen, with stiles up and over it for humans to cross interstate. The Queensland rabbits happily dig burrows under the wire and miscegenate freely with the New South Wales rabbits, just as if there were no difference. Not so the humans, for this place is fiercely tribal, its people belonging to one state or the other. There are two schools, one on either side of the border fence and each teaching a different curriculum, and two pubs, the watering holes for each tribe. There are also two police stations with the Johns, as they're called, in completely different uniforms and probably chasing different criminals. This country is haunted by the ghosts of cattle thieves and bushrangers like Thunderbolt, but at this time the major crimes seem to be drunkenness and the poisoning of neighbours' dogs.

We soon join the local children whose minds are saturated with the Western movies shown each Saturday afternoon at the local School of Arts. These are interspersed with episodes of
Tarzan,
or a similar African adventure where a gorilla swings down from the jungle canopy, scoops up a heroine clad in khaki jodhpurs and a pith helmet, and swings her away through the treetops to subject her to unimaginable horrors. She screams and the children scream and scream, but the next Saturday she is rescued unharmed and proceeds to other narrow escapes. As well as the Saturday matinees, we go interstate to the pictures two or three nights a week, seeing just about every film that comes out of Hollywood, learning every detail of the stars and their lives. We cross the border on our way home from the pictures, hunched up against the cold and huddled into our new overcoats. The air is thin and rare, moonlight bathes the land, the great hemisphere above us shivers in the wind and the stars are as sharp as splintered glass. We revel in a sense of space and freedom unknown to those hedged in, as we once were, with hills and mountains. These are the joys of small-town life — pictures in the School of Arts, and drinking and betting in the pubs for the men. Our father is either working, shooting rabbits for the dogs to eat, or drinking with the other meatworkers in the Jennings Hotel on the New South Wales side.

The railway station and its platform also straddle the border and provide a startling example of colonial lunacy. New South Wales and Queensland railways have different gauges, and everything moving north or south — whether people, fruit, meat, wheat, wool, or even a parcel — has to be transhipped from one side of the platform to the other and reloaded. A New South Wales train pulls up with a burst of smoke and steam; all the passengers, with all their gear
(suitcases
in New South Wales become
ports
in Queensland) hurry across the platform and board the Queensland train. It's like a silent movie, and just as absurd. The trains come often, for they are almost the only means of transport, but always they stop for the transhipment.

The trains on the narrower gauge travel north through the orchards and vineyards of the granite belt to Stanthorpe, Warwick, the Darling Downs and on to Brisbane. The New South Wales trains return south through apple orchards to Tenterfield, a town of elegant and respectable Victorian facades — the post office, the courthouse, the Commonwealth Bank.

Tenterfield is
the birthplace of Federation,
where Henry Parkes made his inaugural Federation speech in 1889, and it was here that Banjo Paterson met and married his sweetheart in the 1890s. But Tenterfield also has links with a darker Australian legend, unknown to me at the time. It is the home of Major Thomas, the country solicitor who defended Breaker Morant at his court martial in South Africa. Thomas had his moment of fame, but returned to Tenterfield shattered by his defeat, with dark memories of the firing squad that executed his client. Now completely disillusioned with Lord Kitchener and the Empire, he sulks the remainder of his life away as the town's most famous recluse.

We live in a rented house, a rickety weatherboard Queenslander, high on stilts so the cold westerlies blow through beneath it where the dogs have their kennel. Its backyard is bare save for the wood heap, an enormous pile of gnarled and twisted roots and stumps, a sign of what the winter will be like. The kitchen is the centre of this house, as it is of all Australian homes at this time, and the fuel stove, burnished each week with Zebra polish, is its central shrine; but we don't get too close for the black rubs off on everything. The kitchen chairs are ranged in front of it in strict order, the favourite ones directly in front of the open firebox and oven, where feet can rest on the hob. There is a fair bit of jostling as we try to share the blast of heat while our backs freeze. Toast is made; the bread speared on the prongs of a wire toasting fork and propped in front of the firebox. No toast made in an electric toaster ever tastes as good as these smoky slices dripping with butter. The wire toasting fork has been bought from an itinerant hawker, one of those sad travellers who attempt to earn
a few bob
by making such things over their campfires, or by chopping wood for the housewife. They are seldom turned away empty-handed from our house or others.

On the hob is the brown pottery teapot with its knitted tea-cosy and on the mantelpiece the tea caddy with a picture of the newly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge on the side. Black tea is the opiate of the Australian working classes. It is bitter and sweet and, in my mother's case, often accompanied by a Bex APC powder for her interminable headaches. We loll in our chairs in front of the fire, or play cards on the kitchen table with its oilcloth covering. This is patterned with koala bears, as is the matching cover on the mantelpiece, for national motifs — koalas, laughing kookaburras and above all the new Harbour Bridge — are in fashion at this time. Before we go to bed, to snuggle beneath our new satin eiderdowns, we mix up Bourneville cocoa, or Nestle's coffee and milk, a sickly brew that has little to do with real coffee. Here in this kitchen and in these beds our lives are centred, we are safe.

Our hitherto gentle Alsatian dog, Caesar, has disgraced himself by tearing the throats out of several of the neighbour's sheep. His days are numbered, but in the meantime he is tethered to the clothes line by a long chain which gives him the freedom of most of the backyard. A poisoned bait thrown over the fence for Caesar is eaten by Barney, our little terrier, and a rough bush remedy is applied by the local animal expert, hurriedly dragged out of the pub. A wad of tobacco is shoved hard down the dog's throat and he is whirled round by the back legs until he brings up the bait. This grim dance of dog and dog-doctor takes place by lantern light and is watched by the horrified children who have reared the dog from a tiny pup. This is indeed a rough place.

The house fronts onto a stock route where mobs of sheep and cattle are driven by in a flurry of drovers on horseback, dogs, cracking stockwhips and dust, to the meatworks and their killing floors. Across the lane is the paddock where the sheep wait their turn. It is waterless and eaten down to bare dirt; their plaintive cries trouble us, night and day. The drovers and meatworkers are desensitised but we children are not. We mourn for the lowing cattle and the stupid sheep.

Meanwhile we go to the New South Wales school where the teacher is a sadistic caner. Some of the children whose frozen palms have been slashed with the cane for nothing more than a spelling mistake bear the purple welts for the whole of the winter and, grim little heroes, show them off along with their chilblains. We have dancing lessons at two shillings a time (three shillings for two) from the teacher's wife in the school weathershed. The lessons are difficult for the shed is small and its boards rough, but the teacher is ambitious. She teaches National Dancing, Irish and Scottish, and the Sailors' Hornpipe to land-bound children, most of whom have never seen the sea, let alone a ship or a sailor. There is a collection of conch shells at the school, and children hold a shell carefully to their ear, to listen to the echo of the distant surf breaking on the rocky coast so far away, or perhaps to the ghostly echoes of the great inland sea which once covered much of this land. The dancing mistress also teaches ballet and doesn't hesitate to demonstrate the steps, twirling and pirouetting on pudgy little feet. Fifty years later I go to a
ceilidh
in Carrick-on-Shannon and see genuine Irish dancing, the dancers costumed in brilliant green and gold satin appliqued with ancestral symbols from the Book of Kells. Hands by sides and backs straight they spring and twirl in intricate gravity-defying patterns; their control is perfect. I realise then how heavy our feet were as we clumped through the Australian version of Irish reels and jigs in the weathershed at Wallangarra.

The coming of spring brings a great awakening, and I realise there are other gardens besides those of my mother and Granny, which were full of exotic flowers and fenced off from the weeds and the rainforest. My gardens are now secret and austere places hidden among the rocks where, in spring, the wild clematis sprawls over the sun-warmed boulders, its white and green mixed with purple trails of hardenbergia. Up and down the slopes the wattles bloom in every crevice and the air is heavy with their pollen. Parrots squabble and feast on the gum blossoms, suck the sticky fruit of the mistletoe, and spread the seeds to fresh branches. I creep away here to daydream alone.

At this time writers such as May Gibbs and Ida Rentoul Outh-waite are rewriting the bush, animating its creatures and giving them English attitudes and speech. Their cosy creations — wattle fairies, gumnut people, Dot's Kangaroo and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie — are all attempts to see the bush in the same terms as English fairy stories. But
The Wind in the Willows,
for instance, with its funny cuddly animals, doesn't transplant to Australia, that land of scraggy gum trees and sharp rocks that trip the feet of white children and skin their knees. It's possible that there are areas and dimensions, sights, smells, spaces and stories to which the white consciousness has absolutely no access. The real stories of the bush are those of the long-ago Dreamtime, and there are no Aborigines left here to tell them, even if they could be persuaded to do so. My wildflowers too are alien; they belong only to the bush and refuse to be domesticated. The clematis wilts in my hands and the wattle dries up and withers before I get it home to the waiting jam jars.

The Depression is now biting hard and work is closing down. After little over a year on
six pounds a week
my father and all the meatworkers are put onto part time, two days a week. On this they have no chance of paying the rent, let alone feeding their families. Meals of rabbit, stewed pigeons or wild duck become more regular. Sometimes there is casual work, when a wheat train pulls into the New South Wales platform and the heavy bags have to be transhipped. One evening at dusk, crossing the railway platform, I catch sight of my father bent over like a hunchback, lumping heavy bags of wheat from one side of the platform to the other. He has been doing this all day, and on many other days. I avert my eyes, but this brief glimpse stays in my mind forever. Hard toil, hard yakka is to be his lot for life, and if you add to this an unquiet home, you can see what his life was like. He actually dies of hard work, of an enlarged heart, six weeks before he is eligible for the pension. Eventually the meatworks at Wallangarra close down completely and, after a flurry of telegrams and phone calls, he is offered a place at Anderson's meatworks at Byron Bay and, before we know it, we are back home, back in that magic circle whose central point is the lighthouse on the Cape.