Roundabout at Bangalow (10 page)

The lighthouse

Because there are no houses to rent, we live in a tent in a paddock close (too close) to the meatworks, on a narrow triangle between the bitumen road and the railway line. This has previously been a camp site for other meatworkers; there is an outside toilet and a blackened tin fireplace with hooks for a kettle and a camp oven. We are on a clean grassy patch, but between us and the works the ground is churned up with suspicious grave-like mounds. We are not allowed to go even a little way in that direction. The tent is large, calico curtains divide it for privacy, and everything, even my mother's prized Singer sewing machine, is fitted in somehow. It's always neat and clean; it has to be for four of us to fit into so small a space. My sister and I sleep on a three-quarter size stretcher with all our toys, books and clothes in boxes underneath, and I am allocated the space hard up against the tent wall.

On fine days the flaps are lifted out and the breezes blow through, but on wet days the wind and rain howl around and our parents hurry out to loosen the ropes and drive the tent pegs in further. I lie snug in bed with the sodden side of the tent flapping close to my face, tracing with a finger the pattern of mildew on the calico. Often the storm roars outside and huge breakers smash down on the shingle, for the bay faces north-east and is unprotected from that direction; only the sandhills stand between us and the storms. But worse still are the tempests within the tent walls. Voices are raised; the kerosene lamp throws grotesque shadows on the canvas and I lie with my fingers in my ears. At such times the tent seems to pulsate with its own inner life, as if unable to contain the anger which fills its space. Despite the atmospherics, these are some of the happiest days of my childhood.

The gramophone has come with us and is wound up on the pine kitchen table in the tent. Our mother's taste has shifted along to the blues, to the big bands with their trombones and saxophones, and to sentimental lyrics such as

Hands across the table
Meet so Tenderly
Though you close your lips, your fingertips
Tell me all I want to know
.

The music floats out over the lantana and the sandhills to the sea, startling both passers-by and seagulls as we play one record after another until they are almost worn out. If others look down on us for living in a tent, we are unaware of it, for these months are like an idyllic holiday. We swim, fish, play with the dog on the beach, watch the steamers arrive at the jetty or, on long Sunday afternoons, walk miles along the beach to those secluded valleys which are now Wattegoes Beach and Palm Valley, and then climb the steep hill to the lighthouse.

I spend the night in the lighthouse keeper's cottage with my school friend, the daughter of the Head Keeper. I wake to the dazzling wash of sunlight reflected from the sea, and watch the breakers far, far down a giddy slope, dotted with the figures of the lighthouse goats. This is a world apart, a neat and nautical world with its own strict conventions. Everything is whitewashed and shipshape; everything is in its place. The lighthouse children go to school in a cart pulled by a strong little pony. The same vehicle collects them each afternoon, together with supplies and mail, and the pony pulls the cart back up the steep and winding road to the Cape. This family has its own folklore, stories of lonely postings to stormy lighthouses around the coast of Tasmania and Victoria and, more recently, to Solitary Island, of school lessons by correspondence and of infrequent visits by supply ships. I am taken high up into the tower to view the light and drops of mercury are placed in my palm. These miraculous silver spheres, rightly known as quicksilver, roll around in my palm, form new wholes, break up and then dissolve into one another like dreams, or memories, or desires:

I hold my map of the Bay in my mind and cherish it. It's the map of memory and desire, its central point the lighthouse on the Cape, dazzling white and pure. Everything radiates from that centre. From dawn to sunrise the lighthouse advances steadily towards the sun and, over the aromatic islands of the Pacific
—
Fiji, Vanuatu, Tahiti
—
the sun dances to the meeting and embraces the tower on the Cape
.

At night it is different; from dusk to dawn the light moves in its steady arc, blessing everything over which it passes. It sweeps out to sea over the Julian Rocks, over the beach with its two jetties, the old and the new, and between them the inshore wreck of the first
Wollongbar,
caught in a storm in the early twenties. It passes then over a lighted camp behind the sandhills, with the gramophone playing jazz on the kitchen table. It passes over the windy little town behind its row of Norfolk Island pines, and sweeps the heights of St Helena. As the light passes over the escarpments, they dream of their past, of the bullock teams, the great cedar logs, the ‘shoots' down to the plain and the waiting sailing-ships in the bay, and back before them the black tribes on the beach and in the rainforest
.

On sunny days we sit for hours on the solid squared girders that edge the jetty, dreamily watching the dappled sunlight on the shallows, the shoals of whiting transparent against the shingle, or a shovel-nose shark cruising in lazy circles. Further out the tide swirls around piers encrusted with barnacles and periwinkles. As each wave recedes the barnacles spew salt water, only to gulp it back in the next leaden swirl, a continuous and hypnotic process. We watch the
Pulganbar
and the second
Wollongbar,
ships of the NCSN, the North Coast Steam Navigation Company, dock at the jetty. A branch line of the railway runs right to the end of the jetty, and a tram, hauled by a small engine called the
Green Frog,
takes the passengers and their baggage to and from the main railway station. We are shown over the ship by the crew; wide-eyed at the luxury of snug cabins and silver service in the dining salon, we speculate about the rich people who travel in such style. This is the usual means of travel to Sydney, for the railway bridge over the Clarence River is not opened until 1932. This service ends completely when war breaks out, and the second
Wollongbar
is sunk by a Japanese submarine off Crescent Head.

In this place our father is kind; he teaches us to rig up a light line each, and how to thread the beach worms or pippies on the hook. He teaches me to swim in Belongil Creek, brackish with the runoff from the heath, then watches over us from above as we swim in the waves beside the jetty. When the tailor are running the activity is frantic as he and the other men cast and trawl from the deep end of the jetty, using a white rag in place of bait, and haul the heavy fish in hand over hand as fast as they can throw out their lines. Catching a jewfish is a major triumph; it can be sold for sixpence a pound to Feros's cafe. A fifty-pound jewfish keeps our father happy and cashed up for weeks.

Sometimes a dangerous shark, perhaps a grey nurse, is spotted in the surf and there is no swimming until it's caught. There are rumours that a small stray dog is used as live bait, the big shark-hook threaded right through the gut. To the fishermen and life-savers the end justifies the means; the shark could, after all, take a child. This rumour fascinates the children, for they are attracted by cruelty, but it seems too horrible to be true. Meanwhile the great grey shark is hauled up onto the jetty, its blood-stained fangs a reminder that everything in the natural world kills or is killed.

In later years the same jetty becomes the ramp up which the carcases of whales, harpooned as they pass the Bay on their annual migration, are hauled to the flensing floor. Knee-deep in blood and gore, the workers, some of them Norfolk Islanders, first test the mammary glands of the females to see whether they were suckling young. If they were it's too late, for their calves will die, but the harpoonist is heavily fined. This trade ceases only when so many whales have been slaughtered that there is no profit in it, and the whaling station is abandoned.

The town itself is resolutely working-class. Perhaps the workers sometimes lift their eyes to the incredible beauty around them, but it is mostly taken for granted, as if all the world were like this natural paradise. It is known as
The Bay
to all North Coast people from the Tweed to the Clarence, as if it were the only bay ever, which it is to them. The men all work on dairy farms, in timber mills, the meatworks, or the NORCO factory, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. Here they process the butter, cheese, hams and tinned meats which are exported to feed the Empire and its armies. Sixty years later its now vacant cold room is used as a meditation centre, the OOOOoooommms bouncing off the walls and filling the space with intolerable vibrations. In the thirties the hotels cater, not for tourists, but for cattle buyers and commercial travellers. Two-storey timber buildings burn down regularly, to the secret excitement of the crowd, and at this time the Great Northern Hotel has just been rebuilt after a second inferno, while the venerable Pier Hotel is to burn down a decade later. The new Great Northern is an ugly brick structure which as a child I pass with averted eyes, hating the stench of beer and the loud voices, one of which I sometimes recognise.

We wander to school any way we please, along the railway line, through the town or, best of all, along the beach. We carry our sandals and splash through the shallows, or follow the high tide mark, picking up cowries, striped dog shells and pearl shells. The sea changes from day to day; it is usually placid, but occasionally roars in beneath grey skies, with twenty-foot waves pounding on the shingle, dragging tons of sand back with every ebb and cutting great swathes out of the beach. The wreck of the first
Wollongbar,
an angular iron shape half-buried in the sand and festooned with weed, is sometimes submerged, sometimes close enough for us to wade out to but for the strong eddies and deep holes around it. This
Wollongbar,
once a racy steamer and the pride of the NCSN fleet, was tied up to the jetty one day in 1921 when a storm blew in from the north-east, increasing in power as the day wore on until, to the horror of her crew and the onlookers, her ropes gave way, the anchors dragged and she bumped her way broadside, lifted by the wind and each succeeding wave onto the beach, to become a tourist sight for a decade, until it was almost submerged by sand and sea.

This was a crucial incident in the history of the Bay. It ranked with the burning down of hotels and the opening of the first jetty in 1888 when, according to the Lismore
Northern Star,
all was made ready for the official opening in true North Coast style:

At the approach to the jetty was erected the triumphal arch while further beyond and reaching across the jetty was erected a pavilion which was nicely decorated with flags and the beautiful ferns, orchids and palms which grow in great profusion in this favoured part of the district. The entrance to the same pavilion having the words Advance Byron Bay in green leaves and a trophy consisting of sugar cane … maize, native heath and some magnificent bunches of bananas … together with some large pineapples.

It is rightly said that nothing succeeds like excess. However all this, like many other events at the Bay, went wrong. The politicians and bureaucrats failed to arrive, so the locals fell upon the feast, more than two hundred of them, and by mid-afternoon were definitely past caring. Stories such as this are part of the white memories of this place, and we children eagerly absorb them: stories of the great tempests of the past, of the many shipwrecks in the bay, of spectacular fires which regularly destroy stores and hotels, and of quite a few pompous civic occasions gone wrong.

At school I am in a big class for the first time. We learn by heart the routes of the explorers, and the rivers, railway lines, the main towns and the produce of each state. We draw interminable maps of Australia and New South Wales with a neat border of blue for the sea, and the mountains in herring-bone stitch. We learn all about the English kings and queens and make up romantic stories of cavaliers hidden from the roundheads by beautiful royalist maidens. We learn
The Highwayman
and
The Lady of Shalott
(by heart of course). We wallow in the suffering of Bess, the landlord's daughter, and the faerie-lady of Shalott, each destroyed by her love for a charming but dangerous man. We are too young to realise how dangerous such men can be: Sir Lancelot doesn't even realise that the Lady of Shalott exists, and the Highwayman, though handsome and romantic, is a criminal. As well we learn the Australian classics —
The Man from Snowy River
and
Clancy of the Overflow
— and remember them still. We join the Junior Farmers' Club and the Gould League of Bird Lovers. We enter all sorts of essay competitions, on the meaning of such important things as Empire Day and Anzac Day, and sometimes win. We are hopelessly loyal to our King, our flag and our God, and smartly salute all three at the Monday morning assembly.

At the same time there is a much more fascinating and secret learning imparted in groups behind the weathersheds, or sitting chewing grass-blades beside the sideline on sports days. My classmates are all much more grown up and knowledgeable than I am for, at ten years old, I am a year younger than the rest of them. One tells me of the preparations for her mother's home-birth, an almost annual event it seems. Among other preparations a galva-nised washing tub is filled with torn-up newspapers and placed in readiness under the bed to catch the blood.
Horror of horrors! Tubs of blood!
I'm appalled and disbelieving, and compare this in my mind with the slaughter of pigs at the meatworks, something which prevents me from enjoying pork for the rest of my life. Pigs are the most intelligent of animals. When herded towards the killing floor they smell the blood of their fellows and instantly know what's ahead of them. The terrified screams of the pigs on the day set aside for killing them can be heard all over the town.