Roundabout at Bangalow (12 page)

The Big River has its own folklore, its stories of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and the white legends which follow and engulf it. The first white man is an escaped convict, Richard Craig, who lives for years with the Aborigines and is eventually pardoned on account of his discovery of the river and its giant cedar trees. Next to arrive are the rough-and-ready cedar-getters, said to be drunken ruffians who tear the cedar logs from the rainforest, heedless of what they are destroying. The squatters follow, moving down from the New England Tableland with their cattle, sheep and horses. One brings stonemasons from Germany to build a copy of a Moorish castle upriver in the bush, and furnishes it with fantastic European furniture, a grand piano, carpets and chandeliers. Stories are told of this family's lavish entertaining before they come down in the world, their castle crumbles and its contents are auctioned — the chandelier going to the Theatre Royal in Sydney. Mary Gilmore, rightly or wrongly, tells of a massacre of Aborigines on the upper Clarence, when the river
ran red with blood;
others tell of flour poisoned with arsenic and given to a tribe of Aborigines at Ramornie. Next come the farmers, moving onto the rich river flats, among them the Highland immigrants, refugees from the
clearances
on the Western Isles, who cluster around Maclean in the 1850s, many of them speaking only Gaelic and all worshipping in the Spartan rituals (no singing, even in church) of the Free Kirk.

When the poet Henry Kendall comes to Grafton in 1860 it is a graceful nineteenth-century colonial city with its own cultural life. There are piano recitals, Shakespeare's plays are staged, poems and literary columns are published in the local paper and a series of literary lectures is given in the newly built School of Arts. Kendall's friend and patron, the solicitor James Michael, is said to have the best classical library in the whole of the colony. After the departure of his handsome young acolyte Michael drowns himself in the Clarence River. Havelock Ellis teaches at the local grammar school in the late 1870s, no doubt already formulating his controversial theories on love and sex, while Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, the renowned Egyptologist, grows up here, and later sends the mummified head of an Egyptian princess as a gift to the high school library. It sits under a glass dome above the bookshelves where it frightens the socks, or black woollen stockings in my case, off generations of students.

The darkest stories are those of the recurrent floods, each one higher than the last as the rainforest, which once held the water back and moderated its flow, is cleared to make way for pasture-land, maize crops and, later, thousands of acres of sugarcane. With each flood, buildings are swept away and men, women and children, farm animals and native animals are drowned. With each flood a thick layer of fetid mud is deposited in low-lying houses, shops and churches. Henry Kendall describes the great flood of 1863:

The river presented a surface of angry looking foam; the swifter part of it being covered with broken roofs of houses, wrecks of furniture, and logs. The last were covered in many instances with dogs, half-drowned poultry, and other miserable refugees of the kind. On one piece of timber, the stump of a tree, we saw a poor little terrier, mute with cold and terror, crouched opposite a large black snake that was coiled at the other end; both, however were apparently cowed by their position. Later in the day dead and drowning horses and cattle were borne down the ruthless river … towards nightfall, the people in Ulmarra, a little to the eastward of Grafton, were distressed by a far more dreadful spectacle. There a whole family, before assistance could reach them, were swept away and drowned
…
Our spirits were not raised by the countless signals of distress afforded by still more desperately situated people. All night long ‘cooeys' were heard, and guns were fired in every direction, showing the urgent need of succour that existed elsewhere. But all night long, gallant fellows
—
heroes of the highest stamp
—
strained away at their oars and steered their boats through most dangerous places, in their searches for the unfortunates who had called them. Had they not worked with an almost superhuman will, there would have been far more calamity than what there was. It was a fearful time
…

This is the spirit of the place — the placid beauty of the great river with its floating gardens and eloquent birdlife, and the raging floods, sometimes twenty-seven feet deep, which roar through its valley.

When we arrive, midway through 1938, Grafton is still the most gracious of colonial cities with stately public buildings and sophisticated shops. The police station, the courthouse, the post office and the banks on the street corners are built on classical lines, mostly of sandstone. Venerable magnolias and frangipani bloom in their enclosed gardens together with long-since-forgotten nineteenth-century flowers such as links of love, dutchman's pipe, and past-present-and-future. The perfume of magnolia and frangipani is cloying in the heat, their flowers turn brown and drop, rot into slush and are trodden into the flood-mud. These are old gardens, almost a hundred years old in some cases. This city has an ambience of the deep South, perhaps of a Mississippi town, with its paddlewheel steamers, cane-barges pulled by puffing little tugs and its disused ferry ramp under two giant and buttressed fig trees.

The street names — Prince Street, Victoria Street, Queen Street and Fitzroy Street — tell their own story of colonial reverence for the British establishment. There is an Anglican cathedral designed by Horbury Hunt and a Catholic church with a convent and boarding school which spread themselves along the river bank. The Presbyterian church is a classical white building built on land acquired by John Dunmore Lang. It has the only spire in the city, and in October and November this pure white spire and the roofs of the higher buildings float in a purple haze, for the hundreds of Brazilian jacaranda trees first planted in the streets in the 1880s are in bloom. They float like a lavender mist above the avenues and streets, while the bitumen is inches deep in a purple carpet of jacaranda flowers. Children ride their bikes through it for the satisfying squelch and their tyres leave deep tracks crossing and recrossing the carpet as it decays into slush, for in this climate beauty and decay are closely related.

The main street has a row of tall date palms down the centre, on what is known as the
plots.
Here are tearooms from the last century, with bees hovering over the rich and messy cakes on glass stands in the window. Around the corner is an old and dusty photographic studio; its oval gilt mirror, more than five feet high, recalls the Victorian and Edwardian belles who have posed before it, and whose fixed and stilted images adorn the walls. Time has passed it by, and all the custom goes to the smart and modern photographer around the corner. Overhanging the old studio is a poinciana tree as big as a ballroom, its brilliant orange flowers and ferny foliage sweeping down to the ground over the white-painted bus seat. In the two department stores deferential young ladies in black frocks with white collars serve the customers. The docket and money are stuffed into a brass container that is propelled rocket-like up a wire cable to the cashier in her glass cage high above. From points all over the shop a spider-web of cables converges on this central eyrie and the cannisters jet back and forth laden with dockets, payment and the change. I long to grow up and serve in a shop, in a black dress, with beautiful makeup and a grave and deferential manner.

South Grafton, known as Dogtown, is quite different. While much of the main city is protected by flood levees, South Grafton is abandoned to its fate. Even when levees are built around it in the sixties, they are scandalously lower than those in Grafton, so that if the water overtops the levee in South Grafton, it immediately takes pressure off the main part of the city with its elegant shops and colonial buildings. This town of railway workers and meatworkers has a different culture altogether, and going
over-the-river
is measured not only in distance but in values and attitudes. The plots in the centre of South Grafton's main street are planted with stunted rainforest trees. Out of their natural element, they drop their withered orange-coloured flowers and dusty pods on the derelicts and rheumy-eyed drunks who slouch there in the shade.

This town has good reason to be called Dogtown, not just because of its inferior status, or even because of the multicoloured stray dogs scratching themselves on the plots, but rather for the greyhounds, or kangaroo dogs as they are called, that are trained in the streets at dawn and dusk. Few children are as pampered as these sleek racing dogs, and many a cat disappears to become the prey in a
blooding
rite which will stimulate their blood-lust and hone their speed. They train in a stately procession along the bitumen road in the mists of winter or in the summer dawns. They fan out before their trainers, four or six in a team like noble horses drawing a chariot. As they move the aura of easy money and golden dreams moves with them; they are part of the dream of
good luck
that dominates the Depression. Everyone dreams of a
lucky break.
A ticket in the Golden Casket folded close to the heart can keep a fellow's spirits up for a month. Each State Lottery sells out instantly, the local SP bookie thrives and all the talk is of coursing, horse-racing, the form, the odds and
big wins.
At the same time people help one another, pass over a
quid
for a hard luck story; they don't expect ever to see it again, but are happy if they do.

It is to this place that my father comes in August 1938, looking for work. According to his letters there are more than ten boarding houses here, occupied mostly by single men, or husbands and fathers parted from their families to find work during the Depression. These are male ghettoes, full of lonely men, and he joins them there.
I felt very sorry for myself yesterday,
he writes on his first weekend,
and I think if there had been a train going that way yesterday evening I would have been on it but now that I have got started I feel alright about things.
He's a hard worker and, though he starts on a labourer's wage, is soon given a permanent job as a butcher, one he holds until well after the war. He is paid nearly seven pounds a week plus overtime; once the war starts, there is more than enough overtime. The war saved many people from the Depression.

It's difficult to find a house but his room-mate, a bread carter who naturally knows everything about the comings and goings in the town, finds him a house in Ryan Street, the very lowest part of the town. There are eight others after this house, but he manages to get it and enthuses over the rich soil and the gardens around it:

Went and had a look at the house this morning and think it will suit alright. It is something the same as the one you are in only not near as good. However there are plenty of rooms and a bathroom, a wash-house out the back, set in copper and tubs and a shed … but the part that took my eye is the lovely soil and nearly all the back yard has been under vegetables and all around are lovely flower and vegetable gardens. The rent is 23/- and starts from today. You will be surprised at the lovely gardens over here. I have never seen anything like it in my life
…

The soil which my father gloats over is flood mud, and won't impress my mother who has been through a number of floods and who can't swim. The worst aspect of a flood is the aftermath of rotting floorboards, soggy lino and wrecked furniture, not to mention the stinking mud which leaves the backyard a quagmire. We live briefly in this and another house before we finally shift into one which is high above flood level. Not only that, it has a spare allotment running down to a creek at the back, with the rich soil my father covets.

Soon after we arrive at South Grafton I help myself to money. This is one of the worst episodes of my childhood, and is for me always associated with sickness and enervating heat. Money is very carefully apportioned in our house and each week small piles of coins are lined up on the kitchen dresser where they are supposedly safe, for houses are never locked at this time. There is rent money, milk and bread money, a portion for the hospital and ambulance insurance, which is collected each week, and other small piles for various purposes known only to my mother. Every coin is accounted for. Meanwhile I am in trouble at school. I have arrived for the last three months of sixth class and am an outcast, for the class is ruled, as usual, by a clique of
in
girls who are buying each other Christmas presents. I take five shillings, buy a few trinkets to ingratiate myself, and am horribly punished. When my mother discovers her loss I am shaken and slapped, shut in a hot bedroom for two days until I am quite feverish and sick on the stomach, and no-one speaks to me. I am hopelessly guilty; a thief at eleven, and, worst of all, still not one of the group.

It is with this on my mind that, in February 1939, I walk through the gates of Grafton High School. Looking back I realise how Anglocentric our education is, its aim to impress on the colonials as much as possible of the customs and values of the motherland. The old high school looks like a typical English school, a standard red brick building with high windows and a steep slate roof. The first poem we learn is Robert Browning's ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad' —
Oh to be in England comma Now that April's there
— and this sets the tone for the whole curriculum. It suggests that we are perpetually and forever in an inferior place and only the English are
at home
. The sport too is based on English models: the girls play vigoro and hockey, the boys play cricket in the summer heat and rugby league in winter, just as they do
at home
.
The walls are hung with Victorian prints in heavy varnished frames, always on biblical or classical themes. One is
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon
and another
The Spartan Wedding.
It's many years before I realise that the bridegroom in this painting is actually biting off the first joint of his bride's finger. This is part of the Spartan marriage ceremony and is intended to prove the courage of both of them. He doesn't seem to be suffering all that much in the picture, even though his mouth must be full of blood, and the experience will certainly prepare her for the killing of any of her babies judged by the Spartan state to be weaklings. Nevertheless these are our models.