Roundabout at Bangalow (22 page)

It's not surprising then that the home on the farm, under the shadow of its giant pecan and magnolia trees, still lies beneath the shadow of war. On either side of the mantelpiece hang memorial plaques to the old man's two dead brothers after whom he has named his first two sons (the third he names after himself). Made of bronze and mass-produced from melted-down German guns, these are presented by a grateful Motherland to the families of the dead throughout the Empire, and soon come to be known as
dead men's pennies.
Each one features an image of Britannia, flanked by a well-fed British lion and holding a laurel wreath over the name of the dead soldier, while an inscription around the outside reads
He died for Freedom and Honour.
No-one remarks that these two soldiers — half Swedish, half Irish Catholic — owed little to Britannia apart from their death.

It's no wonder that my father-in-law is aloof and uncommunicative, always on the brink of some terrible rage. The whole family defers to him without question because of his past and his war injuries. He is often too ill to work and his food has to be specially prepared because of his shattered jaw, hastily repaired in an army hospital in England. The mother, she who so long ago sat with her baby on the breakwater until dawn, has now lost her courage; she gives in to him always, even to his most unreasonable demands. Typical is the occasion when it rains just before the cane-cutting starts, and he orders his daughter and myself (I am twenty and she is twenty-one) to bale out the puddles on the road with jam-tins for fear the cane-trucks might bog, then to take buckets and bale out the bilge of the cane punt which is waiting at the derrick to load the cane, even though it's infested with rats and possibly snakes. It's easier to do it than protest.

It's against this background that LF, as his family calls him, decides to put in for a soldier settlement block. We have considered various options, all wildly impractical, such as buying the pub at Ebor or taking a job as administrator in the islands. We go to Sydney for an interview with the Pacific trading company Burns Philp, dreaming of LF becoming a
bwana
as my Uncle Tom was in New Guinea before the war, but all they can offer is Christmas Island in the Gilbert Islands, a remote speck on the map somewhere between Samoa and Hawaii, without a doctor or regular communication. Meanwhile all along the Queensland coast the government is buying land and cutting it up into blocks for ballot. Thousands of acres of tropical jungle, with its rare orchids, cycads and staghorns, birds, reptiles and animals, are to be sacrificed to the post-war expansion of the sugar industry.

Many soldier settlement farms failed after the first war, due to either the inexperience of the settlers or the unsuitability of the land. The selection process this time is particularly stringent. LF goes before a committee in Brisbane to prove his ability and experience, which he does convincingly. We put in first of all for a block at Gin Gin near Bundaberg, and miss out, then for four blocks on Rita Island in the delta of the Burdekin River. We are overjoyed when we draw a block. For the next six years we will be a thousand miles away from both of our families.

The mahogany piper

Going North is, for all Australians, a metaphor for flight, for escape into a paradisal state of bliss. Visions of fragrant pawpaw groves and mango forests flood our senses. We will lie together in latticed pavilions overlooking coral strands, under palm fronds fanned by delicious breezes. Or so it seems. We pore over the map, noting our block's proximity to the coral coast, and imagine ourselves relaxing on our own shaded verandahs looking out over our broad acres of sugarcane to the surf and beyond to the Barrier Reef.

To get there we travel eight hundred miles north of the border on the Sunlander, a trip which takes the best part of two days and nights. The narrow-gauge railway rushes us through miles and miles of lush cane fields as far as Bundaberg. Here the air is fruity with the aroma of the rum distillery. I later learn (the hard way) that Bundaberg Rum, celebrated by the well-known ditty —
Bundaberg rum, overproof rum, will tan your insides and grow hair on your bum!
— is the favourite drink of working men in the cane fields. By lunchtime the next day we have reached Rockhampton on the Tropic of Capricorn and are now in the tropics, north of Capricorn. Here, where the train line passes down the centre of the main street, we are aware not only that we are retracing the journey of so many of the AIF on their way north, but also that Rockhampton station was the scene of an epic battle, High Noon between Australian and American troops who shot it out from opposite sides of the platform. This has become part of the mythology of the north along with the invasion by the Americans, the existence of the Brisbane Line beyond which the Allies did not intend to defend Australia, the bombing of Townsville and the Battle of the Coral Sea.

During the second afternoon we rock along slowly, on improvised tracks, through Sarina, hit by a cyclone the previous week. It has cut a neat swathe, like the parting of the water for the Israelites, straight through forest, gidgee scrub, cane fields, houses and windmills, mowing everything in its path to tangled matchwood, leaving either side untouched. This is just a preview of the several cyclones we'll live through in the north. Early on the morning of the third day we cross the mighty Burdekin River (it's always called the
mighty
Burdekin River) on a low-level railway bridge built over the sandy riverbed. Neither the Burdekin Bridge nor the Burdekin Dam has yet been built and all traffic during the dry season is across the riverbed. During the wet season, when the floods are measured by feet above the low-level railway bridge, the water can be up to thirty-three feet above the rails, and the whole of North Queensland is cut off from the south. The passengers from each train are ferried across the flood in large motor boats, through logs and debris, and all freight crosses on barges.

The truth we find is far from our dreams. Between us and the sea are miles of muddy mangrove swamps; the river is almost dry for most of the year, then becomes a torrent which cuts us off from the nearest town of Ayr for perhaps two months during the wet season. This wet season is something we have never imagined; it literally
rots your socks.
Everything made of leather, especially shoes and handbags, is covered with a blue crust of mould and clothes are eaten, almost before our eyes, by insects. These swarm in millions, especially around the lights at night. None of the houses has fly-wire — this would be considered a southern extravagance — and the only shelter at night is under the mosquito net, with the Aladdin lamp also under the net on a chair beside the bed.

But there are compensations: each day without fail, winter and summer, a breeze blows in from the Coral Sea, across the mudflats and mangroves, across the cane fields and across our little clearing, spinning the windmill, filling the tank. The valley of the Burdekin lies over an immense and porous gravel-bed which fills to overflowing during the annual wet season. The sinking of a spear anywhere at all results in a fountainhead of clear, pure water; put a pump on it and you can irrigate any quantity of cane, a windmill and you can create your own lawn and tropical garden. Some spots are closer to the watertable than others and it's when we're looking for the best spot to sink a spear for the main pump to irrigate the cane that I discover I have the gift of water-divining. Whether some magnetic affinity for the underground stream, or some heritage from a lightning strike in my ancestry, I don't know, but in the presence of underground water the divining rod, a substantial forked stick with the bark peeled off (although a wire will do as well) wrenches my arms downward as its head is drawn to point, quivering, to the magnetic source. This is great fun and, although we keep it a secret in the north, it's been handy for mundane things such as locating the water main in an old house we buy thirty years later.

North Queensland is to us like a totally different country. It takes us some time to get used to the local habit of ending each sentence with
eh,
as in
It's a fine day, eh!
The north is in a ferment with the massive rebuilding going on since the war. As well as a volatile mixture of Chinese, Italian and Spanish, the north is full of blow-ins from the south escaping wives, debts or prison, or simply looking for a freer way of life. Every adventurer in Australia seems to have congregated here and we meet no end of liars, fantasisers and con men. There's also a large population of Islanders, descendants of the Kanakas blackbirded to work in the cane fields during the nineteenth century. Many of them belong to the Pentecostal Church with its strange tradition of
speaking in tongues
— said to be those of the angels. One is a member of the Ayr pipe band and because of him it's called the
black watch
.

Attitudes to the Italians are appalling. They are known as
oxes
because of what are considered to be their bovine brains and capacity for bullocking hard work. They are not considered to be
white
although a clear distinction is drawn between northern Italians, closer to the European races, and the southerners, closer to the Africans. Getting around the countryside in singing mobs on the backs of trucks, well primed with
vino,
they seem to be happier than most. Many of the older Italian men are still smarting from their internment during the war, shut away for fear they might send details of troop movements in North Queensland home to Mussolini who, I imagine, was eager for the details. Now, with the post-war boom, it's not uncommon for whole families to emigrate from Italy together, all cut cane, pool their money and buy a cane farm for the eldest son, then the second eldest, and so on until each has his own place.

There are similar heroic stories among the Spanish families, most of them Basques and all refugees from Franco. The Scots are mostly descended from small farmers brought out in a group in the nineteenth century by Drysdale, the owner of the sugar mill at nearby Giru and a relative of the painter Russell Drysdale. Their presence accounts for the name of Ayr and for the two highlights of the year, the St Andrew's Night and the Burns Night celebrations, attended indiscriminately by Spaniards and the occasional Italian as well as those of Scottish and English descent. The favourite song is ‘The Star of Robbie Burns', sung with great feeling and often drunkenly by all those who are honorary Scots for this night only. There is a moving moment when the haggis is piped in by the piper. A stately Pacific Islander, his dignity is more than equal to any one of his Scottish models. A hush falls for a short time upon the polyglot crowd, then the tide of irreverence flows back again with the familiar jokes about the
black watch
.

Add to this racial mix the
derros
who hang out in huts in the mangroves. These include deserters from both the Australian and American armies. Occasionally the
provos
or military police from Townsville wait outside the picture theatre in Ayr in a half-hearted attempt to catch them, for it's well known that none of them can bear to miss a movie. Other derelicts come out of the mangroves when there's casual work such as stripping the cane stalks before planting. One wild-eyed prophet suggests that the world's history and its future can be explained by the precise measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza. He carries the documentary evidence of this everywhere — in a large leather-bound volume — and is happy to explain it in great detail, even with diagrams drawn in the wet dirt at the end of the cane drills. Another believes that Lot wrote the Bible and is determined to convince everyone of it. At the other end of the spectrum but still living in a hut down by the anabranch is a scholarly man who writes articles for the
North Queensland Register
and is an expert on the early history of the north, much of which he shares with us.

On my husband's first fishing trip he is taken to a hut deep in the mangroves at a place appropriately called Muddy. Here he and his guide must sleep until high tide, after first chasing a huge carpet snake from the bed, its usual resting place. Peculiar or unusual people are not only tolerated here — the wilder their fantasies the more credulous the listeners — but there are casualties. I hear gossip, true or false, of one confidence man during the war. Absent without leave from the Australian army, dressed in a smart officer's uniform and living it up in hotels at Ayr and Home Hill, he presented himself as an intelligence officer investigating the loyalty of Spanish and Italian families. He was quite naturally plied with hospitality and liquor, and the truth of his identity didn't emerge until much later.

Another, during our time, is a well set-up and cultivated Englishman who drives a Jaguar car around the cane farms soliciting donations to a particular political party on the strength of having been a submarine commander in the British navy. His heroic tales, of sinking U-boats in the North Sea and picking up the German survivors, are almost worth the not inconsiderable cash donations which, of course, disappear with the dust of his Jaguar. Many years later when I study Xavier Herbert's
Capricornia,
I am amazed at the similarity between the characters in Herbert's Darwin and those who haunt the cane fields and mangroves of the Burdekin delta. While many regard
Capricornia
as a moral allegory about colonialism, or else pure fantasy, it will always be for me the most realistic of Australian novels.

This community is totally egalitarian, at least for men. The man with bare feet kicking the dirt beside you as he discusses the
crushen
is as likely to be a millionaire farmer as a cane-cutter. Meanwhile the cane fields are the very epicentre of male culture — its good and bad aspects taken to extremes. Take for instance the daily ritual during the wet season when we are cut off from the town of Ayr by the anabranch in flood. This is the time to put the boat (a powerful motor boat) in the water. The men gather for this ritual while the women stay home and try to appease the children, shut in because of the rain and fretful with heat rash and sores from scratching mosquito and sandfly bites. The first trip is always to ferry the keg for the day's drinking across the flood, and only when this is set up under the hall will they bring across the milk, bread, baby formula and groceries, or take those who are stricken to the other side so they can visit the doctor.