Roundabout at Bangalow (23 page)

All roads on Rita Island converge on a crossroads in the centre of the island. Here, sheltered by a giant weeping fig, is an abandoned butcher's shop, a row of mailboxes, then the Rita Island hall and, across the road, the Rita Island school. This is a popular meeting place for the men to pick up the paper in the afternoon and yarn. The
Courier Mail
arrives four days late from Brisbane, and it isn't an exciting paper even when it's fresh off the press. The hall is of galvanised iron and, like many of the buildings, is built on stilts for coolness. Here occasional dances are held, quite unique in that they include musical items, but always the same songs, no matter what the occasion. One is a sentimental nineteenth-century drawing-room ballad about
a lovely English rose,
which begins with the line
Dan Cupid has a garden.
This is performed by a portly gentleman in a dark suit and accompanied by operatic gestures which would be more at home in Vienna than Rita Island. It's the star turn and is applauded each time as if it's brand new. It floats out incongruously over the moonlit cane fields, the mangrove swamps and down to the banks of the anabranch where the crocodiles thrash around and bellow into the night. No-one thinks this odd, nor the favourite dance which is a Scottish reel called
Strip the Willow
(for some time I think it's
Strip the Widow).
I understand that this reel is regularly performed by the Queen and the Duke at Balmoral but it's totally incongruous here, danced with flourishes by Spanish and Italian cane-cutters and truck drivers, spinning their partners till the floor rocks. It's obviously a relic of the Scottish immigration in the nineteenth century.

Needing help to clear the block, LF hires a man from Wollongong who, with his wife, is renting a small weatherboard house nearby. I become friendly with her when my husband has an accident and she invites me to stay the night rather than sleep alone in the tent with the cattle just through the canvas. She confides to me that, in their many wrangles, her husband punishes her by dragging her out onto the
lawn
in front (it is mostly dirt and noogoora burrs) and rubbing her bare back in the bindi-eyes, not the common
cats' paws
but the fiendish spiked ones called
goats' heads.
A gentle girl with two young children, she has no hope of breaking away from this man. He's been a powder monkey in the mines at Wollongong; now, when preparing the dynamite to blow up a stump, he always crimps the detonator onto the fuse with his teeth, risking spraying his brains onto himself and everyone else within reach. Indeed he's sacked for this, after many warnings. It's their son who later, after a fight in the playground at the Rita Island school, goes home for the twenty-two and threatens several of the pupils before he is disarmed by some passing cane-cutters. Children grow up fast here. A ten-year-old at this school takes his billy and tea with him and brews up a
cuppa
at playtime. Since babyhood he's had his
smoko
and can't survive without black tea.

Meanwhile we are establishing ourselves, assisted by the Queensland Agricultural Bank. We are given a living allowance of £5 a week for the eighteen months until we cut our first crop; everything else is a loan: £350 for a utility truck (second hand), £750 for the house, and appropriate amounts for tractor shed, tractor and basic implements, irrigation pump and the first year's clearing. The sugar industry is bureaucratically controlled, down to the last stalk of cane, the last grain of sugar. Since the cane-cutters' strikes of the thirties it has been heavily unionised. The bitter dispute at that time concerned the burning of cane before harvesting. The cutters insisted on burning to control Weil's disease, spread by rats, and responsible for chronic ill health for some, and also for a number of deaths. The sugar barons and mills owners resisted this because burning caused a drop in the sugar content and hence their profits.

Kalamia Mill, to which we have been assigned, is owned by Australian Estates, a British company with huge pastoral interests in the Northern Territory, and train lines radiate out from it to cover the whole area it controls. During the eight months of the crushing, small shunting engines pull their string of cane trucks from every direction into the mill. Each cane farm in Queensland has an allocation of cane, an assignment which cannot be exceeded. The amount produced in the state is closely controlled as a glut of sugar could ruin the industry. The cane assignment is the most valuable part of our block; without it the land would be practically worthless. By the time we are set up we are in debt to the tune of about £5,000 while the tobacco growers up-river, who need drying barns and other more expensive extras, are in debt for up to £11,000; because of this, many of them will fail.

While it is still raining we begin to build the tractor shed of concrete blocks and move in with our maple veneer bedroom suite and table and chairs, all of which have come from the south, a new Canberra fuel stove and a Halstrom Silent Knight kerosene refrigerator, a temperamental brute that can smoke the place out in a few minutes if it's not carefully tended. Then we begin the long wait for a carpenter to build our house. Two
New Australians,
Hungarians, move into the tent and I cook for all of us while they help my husband to clear the land. It's been a condition of their acceptance into Australia that they must work for two years wherever the Manpower (the authority left over from the war) directs them.

They have escaped together, evading guards, dogs and searchlit barbed wire to make their way into Germany and thence to Australia. Ignace is a ferret-like little man with the tin teeth common to many refugees from Eastern Europe. He meets an Australian girl on a weekend trip to Magnetic Island, marries her, then leaves and so breaks his contract. He visits us years later with his wife and small children, his smile a gleaming testament to Australian dentistry. He is a successful business man, owning several dry-cleaning shops. Joe stays with us for years, sleeping in the tent and then the shed when we move into our own house, saving all his money and sending food and clothing back to his
Mummy
in Hungary (his mother as he claims, or his wife?). There is some mystery about these two; each calls the other a Nazi and they probably both were. Joe tells us nostalgic stories from the old country (Hungary) where, he says, he was a policeman. We are appalled one night when he's been drinking and boasts of pushing Jews down holes in the frozen Danube and of burning the beards off Jehovah's Witnesses with a blowtorch because they refuse to shave in prison. He chuckles all night at the memory. Can this be our gentle workman who is saving all his money to send home to
Mummy
? He lurches back to his shed where, the night before, a possum had fallen from the rafters straight into a drum of dirty sump oil then had run demented all over Joe's bed, his mosquito net and all his clothes. Eventually Joe simply disappears, we don't know where, but I doubt he would have been welcome back in Hungary.

On the block next to us is an ex-serviceman I'll call Jack, originally from Babinda in North Queensland. He has been a Don-R or despatch rider in the army in the Middle East and then in Darwin. He has brought a wife and two little girls from the south with him. Sonia is a city girl, a former model with a taste for fine china and antiques but determined to make a success of life in the north. Jack builds a large shed on the banks of a lagoon. Its framework is of ti-tree logs which soon take root, grow and sprout luscious green shoots, giving the impression of living in a ti-tree arbour. Into these logs he drives a series of six-inch nails on which everything from saucepans to clothes is hung. Rough planks with cracks between them are nailed onto the logs and a flat galvanised iron roof nailed on top. It's like an inferno in there in the summer, especially with the fuel stove burning. Here live the tractor, the wife and kids and the hired hand, a Pakistani farmworker called Dave. The western side of the shed is left open, supposedly so that Dave can turn to Mecca to pray at sunset. The situation suits Jack and he's in no hurry to build a house. When the day's work is done, he can sit on the bank of the lagoon in a deckchair and toss each empty Bundy Rum bottle into the lagoon, followed by the kerosene iron that won't light, the chair that collapses, or anything else that riles him, for he's a nasty drunk.

His wife has a hard time for the whole of the seven years they are there. One day some years later, when Sonia is almost due to have their fourth child, the eldest, a girl of about five, comes running through the bush calling for help. Jack has had a sudden thirst and can't start his car, a long low Customline with enormous fins, so he puts Sonia on the tractor to pull-start it, telling her that, as soon as the car revs up, she's to put her foot down hard on the clutch. When the car starts, he unhooks the tow-rope and roars off, leaving her high above the road, perched on the steel seat of the tractor with her foot jammed on the clutch and her children crying on the dirt road below. She has no idea how to stop the tractor, or what will happen if she takes her foot off the clutch. This is not the first time she's been left in the lurch and won't be the last. Meanwhile he has a certain charisma that is hard to analyse; it's a mixture of humour, bravado, and a rakish charm that appeals to men and women alike. He's the most interesting of the soldier settlers and this, together with shared circumstances and a certain
bonhomie,
attracts my husband. They become drinking mates, something which causes me grief for years and doesn't end until Jack commits an unforgivable crime. He shoots the family dog in front of his children (he's drunk and it's annoying him) and leaves it lying in its own blood until the following morning. This causes a rift between the two men which, thankfully, lasts until we leave.

Soon we build our house, settling on two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, with a bathroom between them and an open verandah as a living room. We intend to make this our home forever, so we build a small but quality house and expect to add to it later. There is much hilarity among the locals as the word spreads around that we've installed a plunge bath (uncommon in the north)
inside the house.
Many sightseers come to inspect and ask the question that is bothering everyone:
Will it smell?
The consensus is that we are now definitely getting above ourselves (they always suspected this). As one man says:
The hose over the branch of the orange tree after dark was good enough for my mother, why not you?

Soon we give in to local custom and build an outside shower as well. Close to the house is the big windmill which pumps up the domestic water into a tank set high on a stand built of four logs. We nail hessian around the outside and install a water heater on the local model. A galvanised pipe fits like a sleeve around the water pipe and acts as a chimney. A shelf below it holds a tobacco tin full of kerosene with a rag wick. Once lit, the flame whoofs up the chimney like a shunting engine, heats the pipe and the water which runs through it, and lasts just long enough for a hot shower, if we ever need a hot shower. As the breeze from the Coral Sea blows and turns the windmill most of the day, dropping at dusk, the tank is always full to overflowing unless I have forgotten to turn off the sprinkler on the garden, in which case there's a domestic crisis. LF has to climb the windmill and turn it by hand to get enough water for his shower. This is one of the few things that makes him lose his temper, and I don't blame him.

Burdekin men

Burdekin women