Roundabout at Bangalow (11 page)

At last we are able to go to our own church, the Presbyterian church on the hill, and to its Sunday school. I am dressed in a pleated blue skirt attached to a calico bodice, and over this a fine hand-knitted blue jumper with a white knitted frill around the collar, for my mother is a fabulous knitter. Long white socks (the garters are a nuisance) and black patent leather shoes, shiny as satin, complete the outfit of a ten-year-old respectable Presbyterian child in 1937. The church is Calvinist, bare and unadorned save for the Scottish flag and a heavy wooden shield carved with the coat of arms of the church: the bush which burns but is not consumed. This miraculous bush, which Moses sees in a vision in the desert, represents both the burning zeal of the Scottish faith and its continuity, for it is never consumed or used up. This is an austere religion with none of the melodrama I've come to expect; certainly nothing about pregnant nuns or their murdered babies, and the siege of Londonderry is never mentioned. Here it would be quite shocking to speak of such personal things as
accepting the Saviour
or
bathing in the blood of the Lamb,
although there's the terrible embarrassment, each Christmas, of singing about the Christ-child who is the
offspring of a virgin's womb.
What is a
virgin
? What is a
womb
? This is too close to the unmentionable. We shun the mystery and keep to the safe ground of the intellect and the memory.

We learn things by heart as if this will somehow buy us salvation: the Shorter Scottish Catechism and the books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and so on — are imprinted on our minds for ever. The Song of Songs is off limits but consulted secretly over the next three or four years when the church service becomes boring:

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins
.

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine
.

I am my beloved's and his desire is towards me
.

This is more to my taste as is the book of Revelation. The visions of St John the Divine on the Island of Patmos are not on the syllabus, but I long to experience the vision of the radiant City of God, the New Jerusalem,
coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
At the same time I torment myself with the everlasting suffering in hellfire of the damned, among whom, I am sure, I will be numbered:

…
the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death
.

I don't know what a
whoremonger
is, but I often tell lies and am always
fearful.
Along with the horrors of the Great War, which we are reminded of each Anzac Day, I now lie awake in the dark, anticipating the coming Armageddon, the ceremonial breaking of each of the Seven Seals by the Angel of the Lord and the arrival of that monstrous female figure, the Whore of Babylon. These bear down upon me until I almost faint with terror. During these years I am very morbid.

Our Sunday school teachers have a more sensible agenda, and enter us for the annual examinations of the State Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. All our study is centred on St Paul, his journeys, his epistles to the various churches he has founded and his interpretation of the Gospels. No-one at this time condemns his bias against women, for it seems quite natural that women should keep their heads covered in church and never express a serious opinion. We thrill to the romance of his conversion, struck down and blinded by a radiant white light on the road to Damascus; his crossing from Asia Minor into Macedonia bringing Christianity to Europe; his visit to Crete and his miraculous salvation from the shipwreck on Malta. Was St Paul a Presbyterian? So closely do we adhere to his doctrines that it almost seems that he had invented the Scottish Church. I'm disillusioned to learn later that he was actually a Roman Catholic. When told that he was a Greek we imagine a fine and noble countenance, something like the statue of Pericles, nothing like the fellows who run the local cafe and are known as
dagoes
.

Religion certainly plays a large part in the thoughts of our family, but in different ways. Consider this: my Granny is entertaining the Bishop to afternoon tea (silver service and fine china), my Grandma believes that the mysterious Whore of Babylon is the Church of Rome, and my mother is secretly reading
The Watchtower
and watching for signs of the coming Armageddon. My father sometimes calls on Almighty God to strike him dead if he has ever lied to my mother, but at other times he is friendly with God and calls him Hughie.
Send 'er down Hughie
he cries out to the heavens when it begins to rain. Meanwhile I spend every waking hour muttering the words of 1 Corinthians, Chapter XIII to myself, not through piety, but because I want to win in the exam:

And though I have the gift of prophecy comma and understand all mysteries comma and all knowledge semi-colon and though I have all faith comma so that I could remove mountains comma and have not charity comma I am as nothing full stop

Amid the family strife I see no irony in the last verse, which insists that the greatest virtue of all is love.

In many ways 1937 and 1938 are years of great change and we are part of it. These are dangerous times for children: many die of croup and few recover from diphtheria, until now one of the great scourges of childhood. Measles is a serious illness, and with whooping cough I am at home for six weeks, coughing myself almost into convulsions. Tonsils and adenoids are routinely ripped out, often with great drama, for there are no antibiotics to clean up recurrent infections. We are immunised against diphtheria in the first mass immunisation campaign for Australian schoolchildren, and it seems that the vaccine is far from perfect, for most of us run a high fever for a week and our arms are fiery red from shoulder to wrist. Epidemics of infantile paralysis (polio) sweep through Australia. There is as yet no vaccine, and several of my classmates become crippled for life. One, a skinny girl called Agnes, drags her twisted legs along with the help of two sticks and dies a year later of meningitis. There is also an epidemic of dengue fever, spread by the mosquitoes which breed in the brackish heath nearby. Though these are unhealthy times, we take sickness as a matter of course and seldom visit a doctor.

At this time the old Qualifying Certificate for high school is abandoned in favour of an intelligence test to sort out the grading. For the next thirty or forty years these IQ tests will be treated with the same reverence as the Tablets of Stone handed down by God to Moses. Children will be sorted into various bins, from
moron
to
genius,
on their results. In reality the results depend on a certain facility, the ability to see patterns in, for instance, a series of words or a string of numbers. I happen to have this particular facility, perhaps in recompense for others I've missed out on, and I race through the test in record time. The headmaster tells my mother that my results are the highest in the school and, he thinks, the district. This surprises everyone for, although I'm a greedy and precocious reader, I can't spell or finish a neat page and all my work is chaotic. I show off all the time, avid for the attention I can't get at home and, misfit that I am, grow more and more solitary. I wander far, picking Christmas bells in the swamp, seeking out the tough flowers of the heath, the flannel flowers, five corners (the children call them
corn fivers)
and pink boronia, or sitting daydreaming in the hot sandhills.

We don't spend all our time at the Bay in the camp. One night it is wrecked in a great storm. The tent-ropes break, the sides are torn, and the roof collapses. We children are hurried to a nearby bush tent in the shelter of the lantana where we sleep on bag stretchers swarming with fleas, while our parents desperately try to protect our belongings. We at last find a house to rent, a weatherboard cottage in Carlyle Street with a brass nameplate on the front which says Bronte, but we are barely settled when it is time to move again. The story is familiar; there is a drought as well as the Depression; the meatworks go on half time, then grind to a halt. Our father now has a loyal network of mates and soon, after a flurry of phone calls, they find him work at the meatworks at South Grafton. When the war breaks out there will be no more talk of closing down or of shortage of work.

The Big River

The Clarence River valley is where Michael Browne, my great-grandfather, was struck down by lightning and where the blacksmith, my grandfather, worked in his forge. Others of my ancestors have also lived in this valley. I know only a few facts about them, nothing about their secret fears or desires. Consider, for instance, one of my great-grandmothers. At the age of sixteen, in 1866, she is married at Ramornie Station. Her husband is more than twice her age, an English soldier who has survived the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Maori Wars. She has ten children, works as a midwife all her life, and dies of skin cancer which has eaten away half of her nose and cheek. She nurses her husband through an incontinent old age, during which he takes too touching an interest in his little grand-daughters (my mother was one of them). I am taken to see her when I am five, and recoil from the stench of the cancer and the sight of her ravaged face. I am told later that she could have been cured in the early stages if she'd been willing to leave her husband, just for a little while, for radium treatment in Sydney. These are verifiable facts, but not the real truth. Whether her life was willing martyrdom or victimisation I will never know, or whether she knew of his close interest in his grand-daughters. All I know is that she was here, in the valley, as I was, at sixteen, and that her eyes, like mine, looked out over the river at dusk or, in the dawn light, dwelt upon the silver reflections of sky and cloud and rainforest in its surface.

At Grafton the Clarence River is three-quarters of a mile wide, spanned by the double-decker road and rail bridge — the trains thunder through on the lower deck, shaking the footbridges on either side of it, and vehicles stream across the upper deck. The bridge has a span which lifts to allow seagoing steamers through, for ships of the NCSN Company come up the river as far as Grafton, and other ships from as far away as New Zealand come here to load timber and maize. There is a persistent rumour, but a rumour only, that the body of a murdered child, a thirteen-year-old boy, has been disposed of in the freshly poured concrete of one of the bridge pylons. His disappearence is quite a mystery. It's said that he whistled ‘Ramona' as he strolled away from a friend's house at dusk, slouching along with his hands in his pockets, never to be seen again. As time goes on more and more people are convinced that he is interred deep in the pylon, deeper than the rushing water, under hundreds of tons of wet and dark concrete. People become obsessed with ‘Ramona'; it reverberates around the district and refuses to go away. Everyone is humming it. The boy is probably far away, picking fruit in the Riverina or working on a fishing boat off Broome, but the rumour adds a thrill of horror when we walk over the footbridge and look down on the pylon in question, half expecting to see blood seeping out through its porous shell. Far, far below it the wide water flows and, over to the left, the rusted hulk of the
Induna
is moored in the reeds by the bank at South Grafton. I learn later that this is the ship on which Winston Churchill, as a young journalist in 1899, made his escape from Boer captivity, first to Mozambique, then on to Durban.

There are said to be a hundred islands in the river, some a few yards across, others big enough to include homes and cane farms. Susan Island is just above the bridge; half of it is covered with original rainforest, with teak and rosewood, with spiteful stinging trees and huge fig trees buttressed like cathedrals. These trees host a raucous colony of fruit-bats. Knee-high maidenhair ferns flourish in the fetid bat-shit while lawyer and wild passion vines crawl everywhere. Carpet snakes as big as anacondas and patterned with lustrous diamonds feast on the fruit-bats, while the red-bellied black snakes grow fat on smaller animals and frogs. The rainforest is frequented by gangs of predatory boys who build tree-houses, rob birds' nests, beat snakes to death and stage savage inter-gang wars with sticks and stones, shanghais and bows and arrows. The cleared tip of the island, the downstream half, is a picnic ground, visited by lovers on moonlight nights and more harmless Sunday school pupils and others who picnic there by day.

The river is tidal, even though here it is forty miles from the sea. In a dry season its serene and reflective surface is deceptive, for sharks have been known to cruise up to fifty miles from the ocean. The river is edged with a dense carpet of water hyacinth, more delicate and beautifully tinted than the most exotic of orchids, and in certain places blue waterlilies, each as big as a plate, raise their spongy stems from the surface and open to the sun and the bees. Here the long-legged waterbirds feed and build their nests, their only world the world of water.

The island floats in the morning mist. It is at once all these lost islands of mystery and the imagination, perhaps Yeats's ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree', the Celtic St Brendan's Isle, or even Henry Kendall's ‘Far Kerguelen. Yet it is more than these, for the island is the history of the river valley in visible form. It is half untouched rainforest, half civilised European pleasure ground. On the downstream half a picnic gazebo, with a tank of rainwater, toilets and picnic tables, rises up from the ankle-deep kikuyu pastures, and pleasure boats are moored at the wharf
.

Yet still the rainforest dominates. Pleasure seekers who walk into its fetid depths suffer a regression and cant wait to get out. As the dusk falls, its fruit-bats venture forth to gorge on the fruits of the farmers and townspeople, the persimmons and guavas, the peach and mango trees. They swoop low over the river, sipping the water with their delicate tongues before they proceed to plunder. Sometimes in the morning light a baby bat is found caught in a tree or hung on a telephone wire. Boys knock them down and kill them with sticks. At night the black snakes of the rainforest infest the kikuyu of the pleasure ground and feast on the mice and rats attracted by the picnic scraps. How can we reconcile the bloodthirsty cycles of the rainforest with the Sunday school picnics on the downstream end of the island?