Roundabout at Bangalow (2 page)

I am born, a fretful fair-haired child. I am brought home to my Granny's house at Keerrong and a telegram is sent to the new father. According to my mother there is no response. Weeks pass and she becomes more desperate. Her milk dries up and I am fed on condensed milk and ground-up arrowroot biscuits. I vomit it all up and get gastroenteritis. There is still no response from the shearing shed. She walks down to the post office, which is in one room of the next farmhouse, and sends yet another telegram. This time she lies; she says that my two-year-old sister, the apple of her father's eye, is dangerously ill. He comes. He doesn't come for my mother's confinement or for my illness, but he does come for his much-loved first child. This is probably not as significant as it now seems. Perhaps he is just worn out by the relentless pressure from the south, and perhaps also by his own conscience. He is at this time twenty-one years old, with a wife and two children to support. He finds work in the butcher's shop at The Channon and we are reunited as a family, but he's restless and discontented and his fingernails, then and for the rest of his life, are bitten down to the quick.

* *

This drama is unfolded to me over a long period, culminating in a scene in a nursing home overlooking a wide river, in a city of jacarandas. My mother decides to tell me the rest of the story at last (I am sixty years old). She has tried to tell me this a number of times but, sensing some awful disclosure, I've always managed to escape it, to cut her short.
You're very lucky to be here,
she begins, raising herself up on the pillows in her pink crochet bed jacket, looking as harmless as any other mother.
You don't know how lucky you are.
She proceeds to tell me just how
lucky
I am. At seven months pregnant, she says, she has a furious argument with my father on the Murwillumbah Railway Station as he leaves for Charleville. She tries every way she can, including physical attack, to prevent him from going. They grapple and she almost falls under the engine of the train, which is shunting leisurely into the station. He still leaves. He's desperate to get away.
You see,
she says,
he tried to kill us both.
I realise that this is just one more of a lifetime of pleas to enlist my sympathy, to range me against my father. At this time he's been dead for more than fifteen years; there's no way he can answer this charge. I stop the car on the Gibraltar Range on the way back to Armidale and vomit.

My first memories are of living in a rented house known as Arkinstall's house. I must be about one year old or less as I lie on my back on a bed, kicking my feet while my mother puts on my shoes and socks. Certainly a harmless enough memory. Another is of sliding on my bottom down a dangerous and precipitous flight of timber stairs, which I now discover to be astonishingly level and ordinary. Here my sister and I lick the raindrops from the verandah railing when it rains, with no thought of lead poisoning, pick cosmos and marigolds in the garden, mandarins from a loaded tree with all the kids around, sit in the thick clover and make clover-chains, and run ourselves stupid in the warm dusk. We have a few pieces of furniture we later cart through a series of rented rural dumps — a double brass bed, a three-quarter bed for the children, a table, two chairs and a stool, some pieces of second-hand linoleum worn through in places to the hessian backing, and some chintz curtains which are re-done and re-hung in a series of houses.

From this house my mother takes me one day to a barber shop in Lismore. I am then about eighteen months old. She has decided that my hair is too fine and wispy (it still is) and popular opinion has it that hair that is shaved grows strongly ever after. The barber is a little astonished by her request. He puts a board across the arms of the barber's chair and hoists me up to where I can see my image full frontal in the mirror. To my horror he takes a razor and shaves a wide path right over the top. They both laugh at the result. Then, deftly and quickly, he shaves all the rest, exposing a pink scalp, bare as a nut. Looking back, I can't believe that anyone would actually do this to a little girl. This is not something I've been told — no-one has mentioned it since — but to me it has the clarity of a moment frozen in time; the surprise of it, the horror, the bald and knobbly pink head so vulnerable. I wear a crochet cap, hot and sticky, for months, but the other kids make a game of it, chase me and throw the cap away. I stumble after it, they pull it off again.
Sookie! Sookie! Sookie!
they cry,
Sookie-bah!
meaning calf, cry-baby, and I am.

We bath in a zinc tub in front of the kitchen stove, and it is here that my five-year-old sister — I am three — is sent to wash me. I stand in the warm water; she decides it is not warm enough and lifts the heavy kettle off the fire, staggers across to the tub with it, and splashes the boiling water on my legs. This accident, for which she is beaten, is the first of a series which continue until well into my adult life and perhaps account for a certain resentment despite my love for her, or perhaps resentment of an older sister is normal. The schoolteacher, a veteran of the first war and the authority on snakebite and injury in the village, is called to attend to my burns. Sickness is difficult in a village with only two private phones and one wireless. Much later I see my mother go to the general store to ring the doctor about my sister who is diagnosed with a mysterious illness called
erysipelas.
The word rings in the ear, strangely dangerous and threatening. What does it mean? I still don't know but, more than sixty years later, my sister still suffers from exotic illnesses that puzzle and delight the specialists and extend their knowledge, while my disabilities are depressingly ordinary.

From this house we begin to attend the Anglican Sunday school in The Channon hall. Their one hymn seems to be ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away':

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where our dear Lord was crucified.
He died to save us all.

I wonder why the green hill has no wall (
without a city wall),
but swoon with pity for the beautiful young man so cruelly crucified —
He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good.
All my childhood, Easter and the agony of the crucifixion has this same effect on me, I am filled with shame for my
sins
and promise and long to be
good,
whatever that means. In my family it means being unquestioningly submissive
(Don't you dare contradict me! Don't answer back!)
and any hint of disobedience is instantly and cruelly punished — an arm seized in a vice-like grip, or a stinging smack to the soft back of the knees. Meanwhile we two are on sufferance at Sunday school, for we take our own Presbyterian catechism with us, as a sign of what our mother considers to be the higher morality to which we belong. We are the only members of the reformed church in an overwhelmingly Church of England village.

Our mother has been forced to marry in an Anglican rather than a Presbyterian church under the threat, by our Granny, of withholding permission for her son, the nineteen-year-old bridegroom, to marry. The bride is eighteen and powerless, but makes up for it later. This accounts for the strange ceremony which takes place when I am six, and an itinerant Presbyterian preacher baptises me in the kitchen with water from the tank. My father, who is disgusted by the whole affair and makes no secret of it, is summoned from the butcher's shop to make his solemn vow to raise me as a Presbyterian, and comes hurrying up the hill wiping his hands on his striped and bloodied butcher's apron. The
service
is half over when he arrives, so the preacher, in deference to what he sees as the finer feelings of the young father, begins again at the beginning, while I squirm in resentment and embarrassment. The reverend is an amateur phrenologist and the study of the bumps on the head is taken very seriously at this time. So he proceeds to read the head of the newly christened child, and then that of the father. For me he prescribes a particularly good memory and for my father a very bad temper — he's right on both counts. My
christening,
then, is quite unorthodox. It's not doctrinal, but an act of revenge on my father's family. It also further marks us out in the village as different, for the values which rule this small society are both stable and rigid, and to depart from them in religion or race marks one as an outsider.

The values in this village, and in many similar in Australia at the time, are those of Anglicanism, patriotism and mateship. The last two exclude foreigners and blacks. There are no Aborigines to be seen, even in Lismore; they are isolated —
for their own good,
it is said — on islands in the Richmond and Clarence Rivers and at other mission stations. An occasional Hindu, perhaps descended from the many who helped clear the rainforest, grows and sells vegetables in the area. One beheads another in the main street of Lismore and is later hanged for it. The beheading is discussed as a mysterious and bloodthirsty foreign ritual, just what you would expect from such barbarous people. The Italian families with banana plantations up in the hills are despised as
Dagoes;
the two nationalities rarely mix. Later, when we are at war with Mussolini, they are forced to run the gauntlet through the village to get to Lismore for supplies. It is said that their cars were pelted with garbage by some of the women whose husbands were fighting the Italians and Germans in the Middle East.

To return to the
facts
of childhood: the second house we live in is called Paterson's house, built by a prosperous farmer specially to rent to my father, for people with money made much more money during the Depression. I am four or five at this time, and don't yet go to school. I hang around the builders, playing with wooden blocks and curls of shavings. The builder and his wife live in a tent on site and the wife gives me a bundle of scraps from her dressmaking. This seems to me the most glorious treasure in the world. I create fantastic and botched clothes for my dolls, and so begins a lifelong and sensual love of glamorous textiles, of their colour and feel, and of the exotic clothes which I try to make from them. In this house I suffer another scarring episode when my parents return late at night from a wedding, wake us up and present my sister with a beautiful (to our eyes at that time) celluloid doll, but pretend not to have one for me. There are storms of tears, hilarity at my distress, until finally another doll is drawn from behind my father's back and, tiring of the joke, they tell me to shut up and get to sleep. Their faces are elongated and distorted as they lean over my bed, holding the kerosene lamp high, then they retreat laughing into the darkness. I lie awake, heaving with rage and suppressed sobs. Later my sister, experimenting with matches, lights the foot of my doll and it explodes in flames.

In this house we have card evenings by the light of kerosene lamps. Euchre and crib are the preferred games, the score for crib kept by wax matches stuck in a crib board. On other evenings paper roses are being made to decorate The Channon hall for a ball. Crepe paper is cut into petals and teased into full-blown roses and buds, and these are stacked in cardboard boxes ready for decoration. Here I am burnt again. My mother leans over the two sleeping children with the kerosene lamp to see if we are alright, and the glass globe on the lamp falls on the back of my leg and burns it. By this time I am quite scarred — home is, it seems, a dangerous place. By the time I am five I have been scalded, burned, run down and knocked unconscious by a bolting horse and had my head shaved. It's strange that I can hardly recall the incident with the bolting horse and certainly feel no resentment. This is probably because it had no possible connection with my family. I have no-one to blame.

The hall is the venue for the two balls and a number of dances held during the year. The balls are serious and formal occasions. The hall is decorated with as much crepe paper as country taste allows (that's plenty) and palm fronds and ferns from the rainforest. The result is an incongruous bower of native palms and pink crepe roses. Relatives come on horseback or in sulkies from all around — from Rosebank, Dunoon, Keerrong, Nimbin and Blakebrook — with suits and long evening dresses in calico bags. Children slide on the waxed floors between the formal dances. Women short of a partner sometimes choose a child to dance with. I view this with horror. Too often I have been clutched to a heavy bosom about eye-height, and swung off my feet, nose squashed close to the armpit of some girl
(bush heifers
my father called them) down on horseback from a remote farm up Tuntable Creek. Straight bobs are in fashion at this time, and
kiss-curls
are arranged in a formal row across the forehead. The combination of cushiony bosoms, kiss-curls set in place with spit and sweaty armpits is overpowering. Children escape, run in and out of the hall, play outside in the warm dusk or moonlight, gorge on sandwiches and rich cakes for supper and finally, sated, are put to sleep on rugs under the supper tables, while the serious dancing and courting goes on until dawn.

The children's fancy-dress ball is another important event. There exists in the village a catalogue of fancy-dress costumes which can be hired from a firm in the Strand Arcade in Sydney, but this is far too expensive for most mothers, so the costumes are copied (more or less). Many are the Arcadian shepherdesses and gypsies, or the nationals of France, Italy, Spain and South America in fantastic costumes long forgotten in their own lands. Some elaborate costumes appear year after year, worn proudly by successive members of a family. Many are the groans from the adults as someone comes round for the fifth or sixth consecutive year in the same once splendid but now shabby and ill-fitting costume. I go as a workbag (a cretonne romper with ribbon shoulder straps), a rose with crepe-paper petals, sepals and leaves (these two are copied from the catalogue) and (my mother's own invention) a pansy.