Roundabout at Bangalow (19 page)

The local inspector of schools comes to one of my final lessons at Ben Venue School and offers me an appointment at Armidale the following year, in one of the schools where students are sent to practise. This would reverse the principal's decision that I go home to the protection of my family and would really set me up in my career. I would also be able to do that university degree which by now I've begun to covet. However, worried and guilty about the situation at home, I ring my mother and ask her what she would like me to do. As we have no phone, I have to ring the Glenreagh Timber Mill yards across the road in South Grafton and wait until she is summoned to the phone. She doesn't hesitate.
Just come home!
she says in the flat and defeated tones that I'm so familiar with.
And I do.
Of all the silly decisions I've made in my life this is probably the worst.

The dance

Most girls at this time have only a short period between leaving school and becoming engaged and married. Marriage is their only ambition and all their lives they have been preparing for this glorious event. I am now one of them but my situation is slightly different. Engrossed in study, I've not prepared a
glory box
full of sheets and pillowcases, embroidered supper cloths, doilies and the like and, because I have a career, my progression towards marriage will not be so automatic. I suppose I'm at a stage halfway between the old world and the new. I'll dance in the light, but always against the background of work and career.

I am now in charge of third class at Grafton Primary School. I teach sixty-three small girls of an amazing similarity, for in the forties and fifties conformity is all. Uniforms are neatly pressed, hair is plaited and trussed up with butterfly bows and bouquets of flowers are brought to the teacher each Monday morning. Stars for good work form constellations in their books, and the backs of their hands are purple with merit stamps which they try not to wash off. I am only ten years older than they are and haven't yet the wit to know that this perfection is mostly surface gloss. Their children, the next generation, will scorn their values and chase after strange gods and substances. The Age of Aquarius is just over the horizon, somewhere up near Nimbin. Meanwhile, wrapped up in my own performance as Teacher, it's a long time before I learn to watch out for and value the misfits; they'll make their mark later, one way or another.

Those who are in trouble stand out clearly and there's little can be done for them. There is, for instance, a boy I teach later in a mixed class. He's bullet-headed, with a face like a fish, but madly brilliant; his intelligence level can't be measured. Yet he's way, way down in a pit of despair, curled up in his own
oubliette,
deliberately out of contact. He walks greyhounds each morning and afternoon, trudging behind them for hours like a surly little pony, and is beaten by his father for the slightest mistake. He sits up the back and bangs his head on the desk, relentlessly and savagely for most of the day. Another small girl with red hair and a putty-coloured face compulsively steals bicycles to attract attention; her father has deserted the family and her mother works long hours in a Prince Street cafe. Every time a girl's bicycle is reported missing the police sergeant retrieves it from her home, then enjoys a milkshake at the cafe while shaking a stern finger at the mother, for he understands that she can't do any better with her children than she's already doing. Twelve years later, when I'm waiting in the local maternity hospital for the birth of my third child, this red-headed girl is brought in in the last stages of labour. Her boyfriend has ferried her in from a bush settlement, thirty miles out on a bumpy track, on the pillion of his Harley Davidson. She's quite shaken up when she arrives.

Another girl's intelligence is so low she's classified as a moron; people are not afraid at this time to put such labels on children. She comes in from the bush each day in the same stained clothes. She can't write her own name, and has nits and boils (a serial infection, I count forty-three when I clean and dress them each morning before school). She's the only child left in her family and has an insistent story of a new baby, not the first she says, who goes quiet and dies in her cot at home. After weeks of working on it I train her to write her name on the blackboard. Then I discover that we've spelled it wrongly; her parents have invented their own bizarre version. I never learn the names of the dead babies, or if they lived long enough to have a name. There is no means, at this time, of reporting suspected abuse, for it's considered that parents own their children and no-one else should interfere. So the teachers just have to do what little they can to help, to divert from the head-banging, to treat the lice and boils, perhaps to round up a few clothes.

The girls school is housed in venerable old buildings from the last century, shaded by massive plane trees which drop their fluff each autumn and give teachers and children acute hay fever. The building is gothic, with arched windows, thresholds worn down by the steps of generations of children, and doors, skirtings and teachers' desks of magnificent red cedar. Mine is one of the oldest rooms, rather like a chapel, and the smell as I enter is the smell of all old schoolrooms; of chalk dust, ink powder, sweating leather school bags and shoes, perspiring children. The compensation is the light which floods the western windows, filtering like a benediction through the lime-green leaves of the plane trees. The velvety pattern of grey, green and lemon on their trunks holds me mesmerised, for I too, as well as the children, daydream through the hot and dusty afternoons.

My sixty-three eight-year-olds are undergoing an awesome rite of passage, learning to write with ink, a nerve-racking experience. The ink monitors mix their brew from ink powder and fill each inkwell, at the same time inking themselves like savages. Wooden pen holders are distributed together with new nibs which have to be sucked to remove their coating, otherwise they won't hold the ink. No-one that I know of ever swallows one, but it's a worry. Then comes the big adventure of dipping into the inkwell and copying the careful writing on the blackboard. Wrecked nibs, blotted pages, inked fingers and mouths are the rule. I teach this large class for some months until another teacher arrives and the class is reduced to forty-five, a usual figure at this time. Anyone with a class under forty children is envied.

The school is divided into infants, boys and girls sections and the teachers are attributed by gender — men teach the boys and women teach the infants and girls. The hierarchy is absolute; the headmaster of the boys section is senior to the headmistress of the girls section, and also lords it over the headmistress of the infants section. Just as well for, after teaching
little people
(as she calls them) for more than forty years, she has become childish herself. She rewards teachers, cleaners and children alike with merit stamps on the back of the hand. I start on a salary of two pounds, seven shillings and sixpence, just five shillings more than my salary two years earlier in the Tick Board Office. However within months of the end of the war the Teachers Federation, which we joined as a matter of course at the college, mounts a campaign for a professional wage and professional status. They are denounced as raving Communists out to destroy the country, but within months they win their case and my salary jumps to more than five pounds, almost as much as my father's. We also achieve, for the first time, professional status, with a Teachers Certificate after three years' service.

During this time I meet Olga Masters, the wife of one of the teachers in the boys school and the mother of four young children, and more to come. Many people see her husband as a victim, kept poor by so many urgent little mouths, but Olga knows what she wants. Her home is clamorous with children, their wet and drying clothes are draped everywhere and the pungent smell of baby's pee hangs over everything. The children possess the home and she possesses them. Later she becomes a journalist on the Lismore
Northern Star,
then the
Manly Daily,
then a playwright for radio and television and eventually, in her sixties, a successful writer of short stories and novels, all of them providing a stark commentary on the lives of Australian women and children, especially in country towns like Grafton. Not only that, her children are successful: one becomes a leading sporting figure, another an investigative journalist, and yet another a television producer.

This distant world with its rituals and conventions would be unbelievable to modern schoolchildren. It's a world of special days and festivals: on Anzac Day the girls dress up as Red Cross nurses and march in the procession with the returned soldiers; on Remembrance Day they stand for a minute's silence for the dead of the Great War; and on Wattle Day — the first day of August — they recite:

The bush was grey, a week today,
Olive-green and gold and grey
But now the Spring is here to stay
With blossom for the wattle!

This is written in copperplate on the blackboard and, like most of their lessons, festooned with chalk drawings, in this case of fluffy wattle blossom and wattle fairies. On Arbor Day we plant yet another tree in the playground, on Gould League of Bird Lovers' Day we draw various Australian birds and swear to be nice to them, on Far West Children's Day we collect money for holidays by the sea for sick children from the west of the state. All these celebrations proceed unvarying, as if ordained by God, and the most spectacular of all is the Jacaranda Festival. Together with another teacher I am detailed to train the maypole dancers for the festival.

The Jacaranda Festival can only be described as a communal madness. Everything is coloured purple for a week, including sandwiches and ice-cream. Tons of purple crepe paper are trucked in to decorate everything — shops, street lights, bicycles and people — with paper blossoms and ruffles. Crepe-paper jacaranda blossoms, brighter than the real thing, fill the air by day and bright dreams drift into the air by night. Perhaps true love will come in festival mood — all is longing and anticipation. There are processions by night and the Jacaranda Queen rides high, her diadem bright against the starry October sky, her diamonds glittering against her purple robes of office. She is for all the world like the Virgin in an Easter procession and the little children look up in wonder and adoration. It's in this atmosphere that the massed schools display takes place and the maypoles are the glittering centrepiece of this most glittering occasion. There are eight of them with sixteen dancers for each, and these are set up in the playground, under the dappled umbrella of the big plane trees, months beforehand. We teach the original intricate steps and these are practised intensively until they are imprinted forever in the childish psyches, no doubt performed over and over again in their fevered jacaranda dreams.

Who can explain the obsession with the maypole in colonial Australia, especially, of all places, on the humid North Coast? Pictures taken at the turn of the century show maypole dancing at an Orange Lodge commemoration at Clunes, at an Empire Day picnic at Jiggi, in the Lismore showground and, much later, at every Jacaranda Festival since its commencement. Since antiquity the maypole has been a fertility dance performed on May Day to celebrate the creative energy of nature and the spring. The focus is upon the central pole, the symbol of potency, and the dancers caress and embrace it with their ribbons, weaving a pattern to enclose and adorn it.

The Puritans knew a thing or two when they banned the maypole. Thomas Hardy also knew the true significance of the dance. This is why Tess, the innocent village maiden in Hardy's
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
is dancing in the May Day celebrations when Angel Clare first catches sight of her and commences the tragic movement that leads to her pregnancy and death. The maypole has everything to do with sex and fertility. New Age cults in Oregon have revived the dance and see it as central to their fertility rituals. In the colony this potent meaning has been hidden, submerged in its social function as a nostalgic reminder of England, or what colonials imagine England to have been like. In Grafton in 1946, though few would be aware of its meaning as a fertility ritual, still the dance goes on to celebrate the spring and the blooming of the jacarandas.

When the great day comes there is a hush of expectation as the eight maypoles, each painted a brilliant white, are carried like inverted crucifixes onto the showground. Their contrasting satin ribbons — red and white, red and green, purple and green — have been specially chosen to display the patterns which will sheathe the maypole. The piano plays a brisk polka with words that are more than appropriate:

My mother said that
I never should
play with the gypsies in the wood
If I do
she will say
naughty girl to run away!

Each maypole is like a roundabout and the dancers skip round them and around, like little merry-go-round ponies, weaving in and out and passing one another on the left and then the right, tensing their ribbons then loosening them, weaving the pattern down the pole then, at a signal, reversing direction until the pattern is undone and a new figure begun. The children revel in their mastery of the dance and their faces shine with joy. Invariably some clumsy child drops a ribbon and that particular maypole stumbles to a halt. Then small faces contort with fury and small tongues hiss at the one who has broken the pattern. A teacher runs onto the field to sort out the tangle and send them into the next figure. All too soon the show and the applause is over, the maypoles are carried off, the shadows lengthen and the showground is vacant except for a few paper streamers, purple of course, blowing in the wind.

In many ways the maypole is a metaphor for the dance of courtship and marriage in which their older sisters are engaged. The figures of this other dance are as carefully rehearsed, as traditional and unchanging. It too has an oblique, a hidden meaning, for it is in truth a fertility dance. Witness the circling around the central flame, the practised repetition of significant steps and patterns, the triumphant apotheosis in the marriage ceremony, then the dimming of the lights and the deserted showground. Just don't drop the ribbon.