Roundabout at Bangalow (30 page)

Meanwhile, at the end of this year I'll be awarded the university medal and a scholarship to do a PhD. This will be the first doctorate from my university on a literary subject, a study of Judith Wright's poetry, and one of very few, at the time, on Australian literature. It seems that, at this time, I'm unstoppable; a combination of being in the right place at the right time and working like one obsessed (which I am). This is as good as it gets. I snatch the last available lectureship — in Australian literature — just before the economic ice-age descends upon Australian universities. Like my father before me I score the winning try just before the full-time whistle.

The university will always be for me a hallowed place, a place of immense privilege. The dimly lit cloisters, the ivy-covered walls, turrets and wisteria walks of Booloominbah beguile my soul. I'm in love with the ideal of the university, its many dedicated teachers and students and, above all, the whole ambience of scholarship and learning. However, even in this most civilised and ritualised of places, vestiges of the rainforest remain. Competition is corrosive and, with intelligent people involved, all with a sense of mission, all with a high stake in defending the ideologies on which their careers depend, conflict becomes passionate and intense. Some have been known to suicide following personal disappointment, perhaps an attack in a faculty meeting or a defeat for a chair, while vilification and even physical attack are not unknown. A university is surely the place for individuality and difference, but it's also the place where rampant egos flourish, each playing out his or her own highly personalised drama.

I get an inkling of this, the politics of power as distinct from the scholarship of the university, during my honours year. The radical changes of the sixties and seventies, including the sexual revolution, have not yet penetrated the college in which I'm a tutor. Ceremony and regulations, both more appropriate to women's colleges in the old world than the new, to the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century, are all-important. The head of college, a former officer in the Australian Women's Services, sits at
high table
flanked by the college tutors. She looks down upon the throng of students who, perhaps sullenly, sing the academic hymn ‘Gaudeamus igatur' as she proceeds, with a flutter of her academic gown, from the high table to the fastness of the senior common room. She's of the
control-yourself take-a-cold-shower
persuasion, and little realises the hostility of the young women who are, notionally at least, in her care. Their hostility proceeds from, among other things, her action the previous year when she expelled a student from college, literally put her out on the street with nowhere else to go, for having a male student in her room.

A similar punitive act which occurs during the year of my residence intensifies the hostility. A student becomes pregnant and decides to continue her studies rather than simply disappear on a so-called
holiday
. She's banished to the far reaches of the residential accommodation, a wooden building two hundred yards away, from where she has to walk to and from the dining hall three times a day, beginning at 7.30 am, and often in icy weather. Her billowing perambulations are viewed by the head with a mixture of disgust at her condition and satisfaction at the punishment she's devised. I'm reminded of this head of college years later when, in Debreçen, Hungary, I see a female commissar bundle a middle-aged woman off a tram into the icy street simply for fainting, for dropping like a stone from her seat to the floor of the tram. The woman was, I understand, exhausted from overwork. The principle —
punish the unfortunate
— is the same.

Heads of colleges and heads of departments have at this time immense power, for the hierarchical structures and medieval traditions of old-world universities have been transplanted, unchanged, to Australia. These traditions don't always sit well among the gum trees. The academic procession at graduation is but one example of this. The spectacular parade of scholars in their brilliant and colourful plumage, in academic robes from universities all over the world, is preceded by someone called the Yeoman Bedell. His function and the meaning of his grandiose title are lost in the mists of the past but, beneath his medieval fancy dress, he's the head of university security.

Courses and degrees duplicate those of the old world as if ordained by God, and at this time most of the staff have been recruited from either Oxford or Cambridge. Many consider themselves to be in exile at the very edge of the known world and some are said to have almost fainted as the plane circled Armidale and they got their first glimpse of Booloominbah among the gum-trees. Lecturers are at this time considered to be
scholars and gentlemen
(women usually fill the less demanding position of
tutor).
It is assumed that their leisure time, lots of it, is devoted to research and publication, and study leave is usually spent in English institutions. Many of the very best students proceed to postgraduate studies at either Oxford or Cambridge, and so perpetuate the central tradition. I soon notice that Australian studies are relegated to the margins and often denigrated as second-class scholarship. A famous put-down is that of one professor of English elsewhere who, when asked why he didn't include any Australian literature in his courses, responded with the taunting enquiry —
Is there any?

When I arrive Australian literature comprises half of a one-year course, shared with American literature. My choice of an Australian topic for my PhD is considered wantonly self-destructive. The professor warns me, with genuine concern, that such a provincial qualification will never win me an academic position. Yet, by the time I finish my thesis, the only available lectureship is in Australian literature, so central has it become. Meanwhile the Association for the Study of Australian Literature has been formed and courses in Australian literature have begun to flourish in Europe as well as Australia.

Then, before I retire, I will see the gradual attrition of these courses, replaced by the more specialised colonial literatures, indigenous literature or women's literature, with study leave often spent in exotic places such as Spain, Canada or Trinidad rather than Oxford or Cambridge. In these latter days literature will no longer be studied as art in the same way as a painting — its composition, colour, balance and detail — would be studied, but rather as the expression of social and political realities, or the illustration of a theoretical perspective. Perhaps this is as it should be, but it seems to me that knowledge is not, as I once thought, a stable entity. It too reflects the evolutionary demands of a rainforest culture: those of hierarchy, of precedence, of a struggle for the light.

But all this is in the future as I begin my third life.

In my first life I was a fearful and stressed-out child and adolescent with, according to my father, the amber liquid too close to my eyes. He was probably right.

My second was as a farmer's wife working beside my husband, firstly on a soldier settler's block in the Burdekin Delta, sharing his determination to succeed, and then on a wonderful farm beside (sometimes beneath) the Big River of my ancestors.

In my third life I'm in clover. A life of study, writing and teaching, it's the most exciting adventure of all.

I
RETURN NOW
to Bangalow, a heritage village in the hinterland behind Byron Bay. This is my heart's lost land, full of the ghosts of memories, the memories of ghosts. It was here in 1925 that my mother, a pregnant teenager, went to her marriage in a grey dress.

Mesmerised by the family drama I come here often, obsessed with the past. I usually turn east down Byron Street between the art galleries, real estate agencies and gourmet restaurants that now line its heritage precincts. I contemplate, once again, the old Church of England where my parents were married, as if the bricks themselves could tell me more about their story.

At the top of Byron Street a large roundabout has been superimposed, like an ugly concrete cap, on an ancient crossroads. From the beginning of time, crossroads have been symbolic places of choice; also, because of the cross, of sacrifice. Suicides were buried at the crossroads and murderers strung up on gibbets there, for both were seen to have made criminal choices.

These particular crossroads are older than the first white settlement, and the roundabout cannot erase their centuries of passing, of crisscrossing, of the pursuit of desire. They were first carved out from the rainforest by the restless journeying of the Bundjalung, the Aboriginal people of this area. Later the bullock tracks of the cedar-getters etched them deeper and deeper into the red soil. Then came the drays of the first settlers, then the first cars and buses and, later, the frenetic traffic of the century's end. In these last days desire takes the form of constant movement, constant change. A steady stream of traffic sweeps around the circle and spins off, as if by centrifugal force, in any one of three directions (the fourth is a cul-de-sac).

In the summer of 1997 the roundabout is the scene of an astonishing coincidence. I sweep down from the mountains after a four-hour drive, and pause at the roundabout at the very instant that my eldest son surges around it at the end of his long journey from Sydney and the south. Though we've each come a long, long way and from different directions, not a heartbeat separates our arrival at the crossroads. Something synchronises our meeting at this precise spot at this precise instant.

Is it mere coincidence or is it a demonstration of the mysterious and invisible lines of memory and desire which, for me, intersect here? And there's a further symmetry, for I have his teenage daughter with me, he has his brother's daughter. My grand-daughters are both the same age, the age of my mother when she first met my father and married him here. They smile a lot. No-one would dare tell them, even in jest, that the juice is too close to their eyes. No-one will need to. Their lives will be quite different.

And so, this time, I ignore the downward path to the past, spin into the roundabout behind my son and, all together, we take the upward way. We pass the old Bangalow cemetery high on the hill and leave behind us the old, old settlements of Tintenbar and Newrybar. The scarlet fingers of the coral trees flourish against the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky and the drystone walls of the pioneers meander around the hillsides, dividing and portioning out the land. We come down into the Bay as dusk falls and the great light begins its sweeping arcs, steady as a heartbeat, radiant as Home.

Besides my own memories and the stories of my family, I have consulted, referred to or quoted from the following (arranged in order of first mention):

1਀਀
The Clover Chain

Pauline Barratt's
Around the Channon.
The Channon: 1999, which appeared after I had written ‘The Clover Chain', is a public rather than a private account of the area.

Erich Maria Remarque.
All Quiet on the Western Front.
London: Putnam, 1980.

C. E. W. Bean.
The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918,
12 th Edition. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1941.

The anonymous
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.
Philadelphia: Peterson, 1836, purports to be a
narrative of [Maria's] sufferings during her residence of five years as a novice, and two years as a black nun, in the ‘hotel du nunnery', at Montreal
.

Barbara Baynton's
Human Toll
(originally published in London in 1907), is available in S. Krimmer and A. Lawson, eds.
Barbara Baynton.
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980.

2਀਀
I Always Was Lucky

The quotation from the
Sydney Morning Herald
on the first page of this chapter refers to the research of one Professor McGuffin and a team of medical experts at the University of Cardiff.

My mother's copy of Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure
(leather-bound) is the London: Macmillan, 1922 edition.

Thomas Hardy.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
London: Macmillan, 1974 (first published 1891).

Nathanial Hawthorne.
The Scarlet Letter.
New York: Penguin, 1970 (first published 1850).

The Henry Kendall quotations in this and the next chapter are from his ‘The Great Clarence River Flood of 1862' which first appeared in ‘The Sketcher' column of
The Australasian
on 2 April 1870. It is reproduced in R. McDougall ed.
Henry Kendall: The Muse of Australia.
Armidale: CALLS, 1992, pp. 117–21.

3਀਀
Maps of Memory

May Gibbs.
The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.
Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982 (first published 1918).

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, a well-known illustrator of children's books, populated the Australian bush with fanciful European fairies and elves.

Ethel Pedley.
Dot and the Kangaroo.
Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980 (first published 1899).

Kenneth Grahame.
The Wind in the Willows.
London: Methuen, 1971 (first published 1908).

Humphrey Carpenter ed.
The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Maurice Ryan's
Time and Tide: A History of Byron Bay.
Lismore: Northern Star, 1984, has added to my knowledge and refreshed my memory on a number of historical points. The quotation concerning the opening of the jetty is from p. 33 of
Time and Tide
.

Mary Gilmore's statement that the Clarence River
ran red with [Aboriginal] blood
is from her
More Recollections.
Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935, p. 243.

4਀਀
Night Thoughts

For an account of the crash of the Airacobra on 8 September 1942 see A. Schafer. ‘Anniversary of U.S. Fighter's Crash Landing' in the
Daily Examiner
(Grafton). 8 September 1992.

The quotation is from T. Heinz, ‘Crash Memories' (letter in reply to the above).
Daily Examiner
(Grafton). 15 September 1992.

A. Schafer and F. Mack eds.
Bombers over Grafton.
Grafton: Clarence River Historical Society, 1992. Schafer and Mack's account, which includes eye-witness testimonies, corresponds with my own memories.

David Horner.
Blamey: The Commander-in-Chief
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998, and David Day.
John Curtin: a life.
Sydney: HarperCollins, 1999, have added to my understanding of the events of the 1939-45 war.

Mikhail Sholokhov.
And Quiet Flows the Don.
New York: A. A. Knopf, 1941.

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
(trans. Edward FitzGerald). London: A. & C. Black, 1912.

The radio serial ‘Dad and Dave' was based on Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis).
On Our Selection.
Sydney: The Bulletin, 1899.

F. T. Palgrave.
The Golden Treasury.
London: Collins, 1899 (first published 1860).

Edgar Allan Poe.
The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
London: Octopus, 1981.

5਀਀
The Flame

Rosemary Dobson.
In a Convex Mirror
. Sydney: Dymocks, 1944.

Hugh McCrae.
Forests of Pan.
Brisbane: Meanjin, 1944.

Judith Wright.
The Moving Image.
Brisbane: Meanjin, 1946. ‘Nigger's Leap, New England' is from
The Moving Image
.

R. B. Walker.
Old New England.
Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1966.

My memories of Armidale Teachers' College and S. H. Smith House have been refreshed and augmented by:

E. S. Elphick and L. A. Gilbert.
A Short Illustrated History of the First Fifty Years of Teacher Education in Armidale.
Armidale: ACAE Publications, 1978.

L. A. Gilbert.
Mr Smith, Mr Jones and a Time of Bliss: An outline History of S. H. Smith House.
Armidale: ACAE Publications, 1987.

The account of the electrocution of Dr Barnet appears on p. 95 of
Mr Smith, Mr Jones and a Time of Bliss
.

The Shakespearian quotations on the subject of love are from
Othello.
London: Methuen, 1963, Act I. Sc. 3. 11. 335–36; Act I. Sc. 3. 11. 67–68.

6਀਀
An Island Too Far

Anecdotes concerning Kincumber orphanage at the turn of the century were supplied by my late father-in-law Edward Walker. Bill McLeod, who was in the orphanage at the same time, was also interviewed by my husband and verified the story of the punishment for bed-wetting.

Paul Gardiner.
An Extraordinary Australian: Mary MacKillop.
Sydney: E. J. Dwyer, 1993.

Grantley Dick Read.
The Revelation of Childbirth.
London: 1942.

7਀਀
Peninsula

Brenda Walker. ‘Over Mountains and Black Water' in Carmel Bird, ed.
Daughters & Fathers.
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, pp. 19–20.

‘Down by the Salley Gardens' and ‘A Prayer for my Daughter' in W. B. Yeats.
Collected Poems.
London: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 22 and 211.

Bewoulf and the Fight at Finsburg
(trans. M. Alexander).
The Earliest English Poems.
London: Penguin, 1966, pp. 45–56.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(trans. B. Stone). London: Penguin, 1964.

An account of Dr Bailey's deep sleep therapy and its consequences can be found in B. Bromberger and J. Fife-Yeomans.
Deep Sleep: Harry Bailey and the Scandal of Chelmsford.
Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

I am indebted to the Clarence Flood Mitigation Authority for the Clarence River flood-heights.