Roundabout at Bangalow (17 page)

During my last year at school, as a routine thing, I've filled in an application for a Teachers' College Scholarship, and in January 1944 am offered one at Armidale Teachers' College. When my scholarship offer arrives there is great consternation, as it upsets the family plan. My father doesn't believe in higher education for girls as, he says, they will only marry and waste their knowledge. However he gives in after much pleading and allows me to go. My mother will now need to supplement two scholarships, but she knows that education is the key to survival if a wife is deserted or a husband proves feckless. So it is, in February 1944, that I set out for a new life, an escape and a brief independence.

My war years were full of tension, but everything is seasonal and there were seasons of enjoyment to balance the nights of fear or loneliness.

The seasons swing around all too quickly during these five years: the jacarandas and their street carnival usher in the long hot summer. The tree in front of the house remembers its Brazilian past, bursts forth in a purple flourish; then, as the sap retreats, casts a fine bran of yellowing leaves into the air to drift and swirl around our ankles. In winter the icy westerlies sweep down from the mountain ranges behind us and almost blow us off our bikes as we ride over the bridge to school. At night the mercury vapour lamps in the street cast a green glow which transforms everything, almost as if this were an underwater world in which are suspended the small house behind its hedge, the rickety front gate, the iceland poppies in their hundreds drooping heavy-headed along the side, a girl's bike dropped carelessly against the front fence (there'll be trouble tonight) and inside, a sixteen-year-old with soaring ambitions: to master the calculus, to read every novel ever written, to find someone as much like Leslie Howard as possible, and to escape.

Once were virgins

This is the first breakthrough in my life. I am going westward and upward, away from the sauna of family emotions towards the bracing air of the mountains. Whereas the whole of the North Coast is haunted by family stories, family drama, there will be none in the high country. Here I will make my own story. The college I am going to is set high on a hill overlooking Armidale, in a building often referred to as a Colonial Parthenon. It is the most splendid public building in country New South Wales, established to train teachers for country schools away from what its founders consider to be the
sin and debauchery
of the big city. City-trained teachers, it is thought, would refuse to go outback, would pine for the city lights, and would infect their pupils with the same discontent. The college was established at Armidale during an opportune moment when the local Member of Parliament was Minister for Education and the Country Party was in power. It was built during the Depression on the site of the derelict Armidale gaol and nothing was spared in its construction. Its style is described as Italian Renaissance but the six Ionic columns across its front give it the appearance of a grand and extravagant Southern mansion like Tara in
Gone with the Wind.
The bricks from the old abandoned gaol form the basement, the only concession to economy.

Students come from all over the north of the state via an intricate web of road and rail converging on that one central point, the college high on the hill. The web covers a vast area, ranging in climate from the arid Back o' Bourke to the lush dairy farms and rainforests of the coast. Along its radii travel all the would-be teachers from an area defined by the bureaucrats as:

North of a line straight to East Maitland and extending to Wal-lerawang then following the railway to Bogan Gate and east of a line from Bogan Gate through Cobar to the Queensland border
.

Many have travelled for twenty-four hours. Some have waited to change trains on stations at East Maitland, Singleton and Werris Creek, or have come on the North Coast Mail, from either north or south, to wait at South Grafton station for the coach that will take them to the mountains. All are in a high state of excitement, leaving home for the first time, starting out on a great journey which will end in the classrooms of country New South Wales.

The trip to the mountains is made in a rattling and out-of-date motor coach, on roads neglected since the war began, and it takes five hours. We turn first of all westward alongside the rapidly flowing Orara River, fringed with she-oaks and glowing with wattle in the spring. Here Henry Kendall wrote his two most famous poems, ‘Orara' and ‘The Bellbirds'. We then climb through the rainforest, through moss and treeferns, through Kendall's
channels of coolness
where the ringing of the bellbirds rivals the creaking and squeaking of the old coach, and then pause at the Hernani store for hot black tea and rock-hard cakes. Strangers are rare in this out-of-the-way place and the children come out to gawp at the coach-loads of young people all excited, all
going somewhere.
The long run through the eucalyptus forests around Ebor and Wollomombi completes the trip. The lights of Armidale as we top the last ridge are as welcome this first time as they will always be. Eventually I will spend more of my life in this place than in any other, and will always approach it with the same sense of joy and relief.

This is a city dedicated from its earliest days to learning, its many boarding schools nourished by the belief that the cold climate, the
clean and pure atmosphere
as it is described in the brochures, is good for children. Armidale is different in other ways. It's even more stratified than Grafton. As well as the town-and-gown divisions common to all university cities there is a third class: that of the wealthy graziers whose properties divide up the tablelands and whose wool is so profitable, especially during the war. These holdings, many the result of the land-grabs of the squatters in the first half of the nineteenth century, have guaranteed a century of prosperity for their descendants. Saumarez, Chevy Chase, Booloominbah and others like them are run like feudal estates, with their own schools and governesses, shops and stores, housekeepers and housemaids, farmhands and gardeners for their extensive grounds, all in residence, all dependent on the feudal master and mistress.

A walk around Armidale at this time gives a glimpse of privilege bought by a succession of booming wool cheques. Scattered throughout the city are the blue-brick mansions, some of them minor copies of Tudor manor houses, of those who wish to live as the English do. The gravel drives, the deciduous trees, the laurel hedges, the herbaceous borders with their unfamiliar lilacs and peonies, speak of a transplanted way of life. In the country too there are drystone walls, hawthorn hedges and blackberry bushes, all attempts to recreate an English landscape. It's quite appropriate that this area should be called New England, and not just for its cold climate. Meanwhile the sharp hooves of hundreds of thousands of sheep are making short work of the delicate native grasses, and the introduced rabbits have multiplied into millions. Feral cats and foxes, the latter introduced so the colonial gentry could
ride to hounds,
have all but wiped out the smaller bush animals. This is the story of a people who just don't understand the country and are plundering and ruining it. It's only in the lean, clean, austere outlines of the high country against the frosty sky, and the springtime drifts of yellow everlastings along the roadside, that it can still be seen.

There is a hidden history too: of convicts, Aborigines, bushrangers, Chinese gold-seekers and working-class immigrants. In 1839 more than half of the male population of 412 were convicts and there were only ten women in the whole of New England, a volatile social and sexual mix. The descendants of these convicts have merged into the population, one or two becoming prosperous New England businessmen, their origins forgotten. There are traces of the Chinese gold-miners who once worked the goldfields around Uralla, and the grave of the famous bushranger Thunderbolt is there. Now the working people, the drovers, shearers and others, survive in the weatherboard cottages huddled together around the city.

The most imposing monument to the old world at the time of my arrival is Booloominbah, a many gabled and towered castle in the bush on the outskirts of the city. It's an elaborate fantasy, a copy of a Scottish castle erected by the White family to celebrate their possession of vast tracts of the country's richest wool-growing acres. (Patrick White was a member of this family). Their properties included — as well as Booloominbah — Belltrees at Scone and Saumarez at Armidale. The architect Horbury Hunt designed Booloominbah, along with the Anglican cathedrals in Armidale and Grafton. Here the university college is housed and at this time all the lectures are given in Booloominbah, and some of the students even live high in its fairy-tale towers. I cast a glance in that direction, but it's impossible for me; the prospect of a four-year course followed by a five hundred pound bond to teach high school for five years is beyond the imagination of my parents, or indeed myself. I'll make up for it twenty years later.

As it is I'm subject to a bond of three hundred pounds, payable to the Education Department if I fail to teach for three years. As my father owns no property, he must go cap-in-hand to two people of means in South Grafton — our doctor and the proprietor of the local department store — to guarantee my bond. These people think nothing of signing such guarantees; they do it all the time for young people in my circumstances, but nevertheless it hurts my father to have to ask. I also have to fend off an attempt by my parents to shift me to Sydney Teachers College where my sister could, in their words,
keep an eye on me.
They enlist the help of their local Member of Parliament, but by the time the wheels of influence turn I am well and truly installed at Armidale and the principal simply sends back the letter of transfer with his own annotation. Pop Newling, as he is known to all, fiercely protects
his
College and
his
students and, as I am one of only three admitted at sixteen, the rules having been relaxed because of the shortage of teachers during the war, he'll make sure that I don't depart for what he calls the
fleshpots
of the city.

I arrive at the college underage and anaemic, a bottle of iron tonic in my luggage, but burning with curiosity and ambition. I buy my first copy of
Meanjin Papers
and learn that there is such a thing as serious Australian poetry. I buy Rosemary Dobson's
In a Convex Mirror
and Hugh McCrae's
Forests of Pan;
it's still a year too early for Judith Wright's
The Moving Image
but her poems are beginning to appear in
Meanjin Papers.
Creeping late into church one Sunday night, having worked on a country property all day picking peas for the Land Army, I hear
The Messiah
for the first time. I come to the portal of the church just as the choir begins ‘I Know that my Redeemer Liveth' and suddenly glimpse a realm of religious mystery beyond the morbidity and melodrama of my childhood. I will learn much more in the two years I'm here and some of it I'll have to unlearn later. The values which were then current, such as
the onward march of progress,
or
an Australian identity based on a fair go for all,
now seem simplistic in that they exclude so much, especially Aboriginally. There is no study of Aboriginal life and culture and until much later no special training to teach Aborigines. Memories of the Aboriginal massacres on the Tablelands have been repressed, to be revealed later in R.B. Walker's
Old New England
and Judith Wright's moving poem ‘Nigger's Leap, New England'. Both deal with an Aboriginal tribe driven like cattle over a precipice in the New England Ranges, simply because they are a nuisance to some of the squatters. This is the dark side of the pioneering heritage of New England, but we don't acknowledge it at this time. Oblivious to such things as we are, the two years spent here are among the most inspiring of my life.

All is serenity, order and ritual. The elm-tree drive, left over from the old gaol, leads proudly to the the massive front doors, opened by two of the women students in virginal white for no-one less important than the local Member of Parliament or the Minister for Education. We are not allowed to cross the polished parquetry of the entrance hall, but must enter by a side door so as not to scratch the floor. The massive staircase is overlooked by four formal portraits including that of the Director of Education, S. H. Smith, painted by William Dobell, who is almost unknown at this time. Norman Lindsay's
Odysseus
with its alluring barebreasted sirens hangs above them, providing a completely different message, one more in tune with adolescent longings. Beyond the staircase are acres of golden polished floorboards in auditorium and gymnasium and a carpeted library as big as a ballroom. Here an oil painting of a laughing and flirtatious nun peeping through red velvet curtains (another mixed message) looks down on those who are trying to read or study. The sun pours into the library, and I curl up there like a cat, reading, studying and luxuriating.

These paintings are part of the College's collection of Australian Art, donated by Howard Hinton, an eccentric collector who, while living in a humble room in a Sydney boarding house and working for a shipping company, gifted to the College the best collection of Australian Art outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We are surrounded on all sides, in corridors, reception rooms and lecture rooms, by the paintings of Norman Lindsay, of the
plein air
impressionists — Roberts, Streeton and Ashton — of Hilder, Buckmaster, Gruner, Proctor and others. I've heard it said that this collection is idiosyncratic and dated, but to us, coming from homes where the highest in art is the decorative lid on a chocolate box or the highland cattle on our Granny's walls, it is a visionary revelation. Now our tastes are moulded by the paintings that we confront each day, and by the many lectures on them. A daydreamer like myself could spend a whole lecture period focusing on a painting, perhaps Hilder's
Evening, Dora Creek,
absorbing it into my imagination, making it my own forever. We little know, as we sit at the benches in the art room, that behind us in the basement are stored the art and manuscript treasures of the Mitchell Library and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They have been smuggled in at night and hidden there for safe keeping during the war, for both buildings are too close to the naval dockyard at Woolloomooloo in case of a bombing raid.

This is 1944, the last full year of the war, and we gather each Friday morning for a patriotic assembly. The national anthem and the two hymns, Blake's ‘Jerusalem' and ‘I Vow to Thee my Country', are followed by a solemn reading, one by one, of the names of all the ex-students in the services. The reading is done by six women students clad in white and chosen for the purity of their diction. The principal is sorrowing for every one of his students killed in the war or taken prisoner by the Japanese, and writes many a compassionate letter to their parents. A book of remembrance is kept in the upstairs vestibule and contains the portraits and particulars of all those who have been killed, one to a page. A page is solemnly turned each week so that we can, as we pass, look upon their faces. We are all proud of being part of a community of New South Wales teachers, some of whose members have given their lives for their country.