Roundabout at Bangalow (15 page)

On the second night Rob and another soldier come rushing up the front steps, sunburned from the North African sun, and full of joy to be home. Rob wants to see my father but, as he's not here, pulls me onto his knee in the big lounge chair, kisses me warmly (I don't mind at all), blows into my ear and whispers that I'll soon be big enough to carry a kerosene tin full of water (the test for female maturity or, not to put too fine a point on it,
female readiness
in country Australia). They both laugh, and I do too. The whistle shrieks again and again, he dashes back to the train and I return, somewhat thoughtfully, to my maths homework. I'm struggling with calculus and get no help from my teacher, who's too busy running the Scripture Union at the school to bother with his three honours students. I learn later that Rob's mother and sisters have been waiting for two days on the railway station at Casino hoping to catch a glimpse of him on his way north. Two of his sisters immediately join the Land Army and go north to the Atherton Tableland to be near him while he does his jungle training.

Coming home one day from Rathgar, the South Grafton orphanage run by the United Protestant Association where I sometimes help out with the children, I come across a shocking sight. Although there are few Aborigines in South Grafton, one family is living in a fibro shack near the tin bridge over the railway line.

On the grass beside the crossroads, under the railway viaduct, an old and very black Aboriginal man is crouched, rocking from side to side in pain. Thick red blood is oozing through his fingers and running down his arms to the elbows. I run home to get my father, hoping that he'll get the police or the ambulance. He knows about it already. One of his former workmates, a rough street fighter, is home on leave from the AIF and is celebrating by bashing every Aborigine in the town. My father and probably everyone else in the town knows what's going on. He comes back with me but the old man is gone and I never see him again.

This is my first experience of brutality towards Aborigines. I'm never able to forget the sight of the miserable old man with the thick blood running through his fingers and down to his elbows. Later I realise that not all atrocities take place away from home and that the AIF, like all armies, contains all sorts.

Home thoughts

During these years our home looks peaceful, from the outside at least, even prosperous. It is furnished in the typical bourgeois style of the forties, everything ordered from Anthony Hordern's big emporium at Brickfield Hill and paid off over a number of years. We have an oak dining-room setting and an oak ice-chest, filled three times a week by the iceman, who staggers in the back door with the dripping block held in massive iron pincers. The pine kitchen dresser, after withstanding six houses and a beach camp, is replaced by a stylish veneer kitchen cabinet. I still sit, until I am sixteen and beyond, on the long stool behind the kitchen table, as if I'll never be old enough for my own chair. The lounge is fitted out with a velvet-covered lounge suite in
autumn tonings
and the AWA console radio in the corner of the lounge brings us the news at seven (preceded by the chimes of Big Ben in London), ‘Dad and Dave' and the Amateur Hour' at night, and ‘The Lawsons' at lunch time. This long-running serial deals with the tribulations of a country family, courageously borne of course, during the war. There are all the difficulties of getting in the wheat and shearing their sheep, what with all the men away being officers and leading their men into battle. The characters have plummy accents and plummy attitudes, and we happily accept this, but ‘Dad and Dave', based on Steele Rudd's
On Our Selection
and ushered in by the song ‘The Road to Gundagai', is more to our taste.

My father has his own kingdom called
down-the-back.
He's at last in his element, standing waist-high in a sea of tomato plants and looking around him at rows and rows of potatoes, the earth hilled up to protect them from heat and pests, as well as lettuce, peas, beans, shallots and more. Growing the family vegetables is not simply an economic measure, it's a matter of pride in being able to provide for his own. Many families, as well as growing all their own vegetables, keep a cow on the common and milk it morning and night, if someone else doesn't get to it first. People help themselves and each other, for there's no welfare safety-net. Houses are never locked. Honesty is taken for granted. There is a twenty-two behind the kitchen door in most homes, to shoot rabbits, snakes, rats or, if despair takes over, oneself — usually down by the woodheap. Woodheaps are significant sites.

It is here that my father melts down lead and casts his own sinkers, rigs up his fishing lines, different weights and rigs for different fish — perch, bream, flathead, garfish — and at this time the river is teeming with fish. There are other rituals which belong to the woodheap. Here roosters are decapitated and cats castrated. The killing of the rooster is a regular Saturday afternoon event. The bird, swiftly beheaded, runs round and round in circles spouting blood until it drops, while men and dogs watch with interest. Occasionally there is a tomcat to be castrated as there is no local vet. Female cats are drowned at birth. The local expert, a friend of my father, arrives with a sugar bag and a razor blade sterilised in a tobacco tin of kerosene. It's all over in a flash: the cat in the bag, its tail pulled through a hole in the corner, testicles sliced off, sent on its way with a pat and a cheery message among much laughter. The women and girls pretend they don't know what's going on, although for a few days at least they are especially kind to the cat who is no longer a tom.

My father now has his own boat, a half-cabin motor boat called
The Wattle
which he's bought with the workers' compensation after an injury at work with a razor-sharp filleting knife. Three of his fingers are cut through to the bone, but the local surgeon is able to rejoin the tendons in an operation so skilful that it's written up in the medical journals. Owning
The Wattle
opens up a whole new world. On misty mornings we head up-river, casting anchor in sunny inlets at Seelands, Mountain View or Carrs Creek, or sometimes in the deep shadows below Moleville Rocks. He's after freshwater perch, the best and sweetest fish of all. Even so far from the sea the river still obeys the pull of the tides and the moon. Vast islands of water-hyacinth drift on the flood-tide and, in the quiet bays where the cows come down to drink, the waterlilies float and dream while the waterbirds, the coots and redbills, call to one another among the reeds.

The boat rocks gently from side to side and I dream too, looking deep down, fishing-line in hand to satisfy my father, but not caring whether I catch a fish or not. I dream of escape or, better still, of rescue by some extravagant stranger, preferably Leslie Howard.
Gone with the Wind
has just come to town and our minds are possessed by dreams of Southern belles and masterful men. There is a competition in the town for the girl who most resembles Scarlett and the portraits of the finalists take over the photographer's window for a brief time, but the memory of the film and its influence linger on. For five or six years we will wear our hair as Scarlett did, swept up at the sides and long at the back, and dream of either the testosterone-driven Clark Gable or the pale and intellectual Leslie Howard. The latter soon becomes a martyr, shot down by the Germans over the English Channel, and so lost to all the women who yearn for him. These are good times, drifting and dreaming in tranquillity on the river.

My father is now in his thirties and has slipped easily into the culture of the meatworkers. They work hard, play poker at lunchtime and drink together after work. He's a skilful gambler, very quick thinking, good at figures and, as we know,
always lucky.
Later he pencils for a bookie at the races; this requires similar skills. There are also bonuses to be made at work. A gallstone discovered in a still warm carcass, slipped into the pocket and sent to a Chinese herbalist in Sydney, can be worth a week's wages, and slink skins, the skins of unborn calves, are sent away to be professionally cured and made into women's handbags. He joins the Royal and Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, a working man's lodge. They drink a lot and have obscure blokish rituals, something to do with buffaloes' horns. Penalties are imposed for drinking too much, not drinking enough, for laughing, sneezing, swearing or for telling unfunny jokes. Later he will be flattered by an invitation to join the Masonic Lodge, for membership is the stamp of middle-class respectability and Masons are forbidden to touch their brethren's wives or daughters. This still leaves eighty per cent of the female population. My mother will scoff and read the forbidden Masonic manual from cover to cover, an act of sacrilege if not blasphemy. She cares nothing for the
Curse of Solomon
; the way her life is it would probably be a bonus.

He comes home each evening in the dusk and the whole house stills as we listen to his ritual and wonder how it will be tonight: the click of the side gate, the sound of the bicycle leant carefully against the shed wall, then the deliberate slicing of the chips for the morning fire. We never know what to expect. At times he is happy and laughing, having perhaps won at poker in his lunch hour. Or he may have detoured by the Saleyards Hotel, the Great Northern, or even the Five Mile, in which case his temper can flare up in an instant, and the house is too small for the battles which follow. Sometimes acrimonious disputes go on for months. When times are bad I lie awake late into the night listening to her recriminations and his threats to
clear out
as soon as the children are grown up — to New Guinea, to the war, to Tasmania — to anywhere but here. I'm afraid to go to sleep until the storm has blown itself out, and afraid to wake up in the morning. On many a morning I wake up wondering whether she is dead or he is gone,
cleared out
at last.

It's probably because of this that I behave so badly at school. I am the class fool, always passing notes, giggling and talking in class, disrupting the lessons. One day we are sent to do a special task in the Domestic Science block. We are to pack up the Christmas parcels for the ex-students in the forces and are sternly forbidden to include a note. None of us has even thought of doing this, but I in particular can't resist the idea. All parcels for overseas have to be stitched up in calico and addressed in indelible pencil. The calico is rough, the needle big and awkward and the twine cuts my hands but I complete the job. Others address the parcel so I don't know its destination. Months later I receive a note of thanks from someone who assumes I'm grown up and have myself donated the contents of the parcel. In my fulsome letter of reply (I'm flattered to get a letter from a soldier) I somehow reveal that I'm only fourteen (not yet old enough to carry a kerosene tin full of water) and the correspondence stops abruptly.

All this time my mother is deteriorating. She is tense, hysterical, unable to do the simplest task on time. She hasn't completed the unpacking in this, the sixth house in twelve years. The third bedroom is full of packing cases, and the packing cases are full of the crumbling mementos of the past. It's as if she can't bear to unpack one more time, or ever again. The washing is left soaking in the laundry tubs then forgotten, the ironing is put off for weeks then done in a burst of energy in the middle of the night when she can't sleep. She runs up big bills at the doctor's, but he can't diagnose anything except, he tells me many years later,
instability.
She is agoraphobic at a time when neither the word nor the complaint has been heard of, and backs out of every outing at the last moment. Our father tries to be sympathetic but he's orderly and can't stand the mess. He's at times kind, at other times enraged. The tension is catching; my hands break out in a rash of maddeningly itchy blisters which don't clear up for years. I become an expert at gauging my mother's moods and placating her. At some deep level I am attuned to her obsessions. I fear some obscure and horrible disaster which by some convoluted reasoning will be my fault. I cry a lot. My mother says I'm too sensitive. My father puts it more bluntly.
The piss is too close to your eyes,
he says, as he walks out in disgust.

I try to escape but it's too difficult. It's been decided that my sister should go to Teachers' College and I should stay at home and get a job in Grafton. At fourteen I am sent to sit for the examination for a telephonist, despite the fact that I'm right at the top of my class and a year younger than anyone else in it. I surprise everyone by coming first in the state and am offered my choice of any telephone exchange anywhere. I choose Canberra. My mother takes fright and sends me straight back to school. The next year I answer an advertisement for a teacher at a subsidised school at Crossmaglen. A subsidised school is one at which there are not enough pupils to justify a trained teacher, so the parents contribute to the salary, and the state subsidises it. I imagine myself leading a happy and carefree life among the little children in the lush countryside near Sawtell, and perhaps marrying a jolly dairy farmer like my uncles, but this is once again squashed. I cut out an advertisement for a position as cadet journalist for the social columns on the
Northern Star
in Lismore. Here I would be close to my father's relatives whom I love, and I can just imagine myself writing descriptions of the lovely frocks of brides and debutantes. My mother is horrified by this, especially as I've recently (twice) proved that I can't be trusted. I have at fourteen accepted an icecream from a boy and at fifteen kissed an airman. This is enough to chill any parental heart, and theirs are easily chilled.

I meet a young boy at the butchers' picnic at McPhersons Crossing on the Nymboida River. This is the same picnic at which a very beautiful young girl wandered off with a raunchy workmate of my father's and
got into trouble,
thus buying many years of misery for herself and providing a horrifying lesson for the rest of us. Later I encounter the boy in Prince Street and he invites me to share an icecream sundae in Schwinghammer's cafe. This is much worse than loitering with boys on street corners and getting oneself talked about. When my father somehow finds out there is a horrible scene at home and the boy is warned off. He is a pallid and uncertain youth, described by my father as looking like
dog's vomit.
The first boy who takes any notice of me looks like
dog's vomit
! Meanwhile it is established in the family that I need to be watched.