Roundabout at Bangalow (24 page)

Redeem the time

I am marooned in a clearing surrounded by a sea of shoulder-high dry grass. The clearing is just off a dirt road on an island. I am marooned on an island in a river of sand or raging flood, take your pick. The river is in the far north of the state of Queensland, named in the last century after a fat German woman on the other side of the world. Clustered around me are the inanimate objects that bind me here: a weatherboard house sweltering in the heat, two rooms and a verandah, a tractor shed built of concrete blocks, an outside toilet a hundred yards away, a fuel copper and a set of laundry tubs under a tree and, towering over all, the windmill.

The windmill is the centre of this world. Without it the clearing would be dry dirt for most of the year. The span, a massive twelve feet, spins incessantly all day. The monotonous clink of the turning mill portions out the minutes, the hours, the days. My only meaning is in work.

I plant the runners of a certain tropical grass and water them with a sprinkler all day, every day. The lawn flourishes. It takes me five hours each weekend to cut it with a hand mower. All the floorboards are polished each week with dark tan boot polish, board by board, on my knees. I buy a pedal sewing machine and make all my husband's shirts from a stout cloth called Caesarine. He has the best work-shirts on the island. Each day I cook three meals for anyone and everyone working in the cane. As well I trudge twice a day to the workers with
smoko
: a billy of hot black tea and biscuits. I try not to notice the tracks, varying in size from the thickness of my finger to that of my wrist, which show that snakes have slithered across the dirt track, maybe twenty since the tractor has passed earlier that morning. Meanwhile the windmill turns and clinks, turns and clinks. Is this all? It's meaningless without children.

Soon this will change, and suddenly. The most miraculous happening at Rita Island is the birth of my first child. Coming after more than four years of apparent sterility, visits to specialists in Sydney and Townsville to find the reason, and many disappointments, it seems a total miracle, as every birth is. The birth of a first then a second child, especially miraculous against a background of hardship, will redeem this time and this place. But first, a word about medical practice North Queensland style. Most northeners are tougher than I am. I've been a coward since childhood and the system is not for the faint-hearted. When LF has a skin cancer on the back of his neck, the doctor leads him out into the sun, where the light is better he says, sits him straddling a chair with his head over the chair-back and cuts it out on the spot, blood everywhere. The half-dozen stitches are so tight that his adam's apple and the flesh on his jaw are pulled to the right for quite some time, giving him a sardonic smirk. The doctor is very satisfied with himself —
There you go; not enough radium in Queensland to kill that one!

My first experience is when I have an emergency operation for what is thought to be an ectopic pregnancy, but turns out to be simply an ovarian cyst. This happens on my husband's thirty-second birthday, 10 October 1950. I am just twenty-three, too young to be carved up in the way that I am. This takes place in a small cottage hospital in a back street of Ayr. Why I am not sent to the public hospital, where there is at least a fully equipped operating theatre, or even to Townsville where there are specialists, I don't know, but at this time no-one questions a doctor's decisions. I learn later that the doctor, a young woman acting as locum for my GP, has had to send up to the Ayr hospital for equipment for the operation. Perhaps she just wanted to try her hand. In any case what should have been a routine thing ends up as major surgery.

I wake up in the late afternoon in a four-bed ward with the three other inmates watching me with some interest. It appears that I've been choking and to prevent me swallowing my tongue the doctor has put a large bodkin through it. I can hardly speak or swallow for days. A Spanish woman has her baby. Brought as a bride from Spain by an older man who's made his fortune here, she is now fulfilling her part of the bargain, but hasn't yet learned enough English to distinguish between
pain
and
pan,
so she seldom gets what she wants. Meanwhile the floors are swilled with a dirty rag by a snaggle-toothed old man whose head appears over the edge of the mattress when least expected, staring curiously at whatever is going on there. When I'm recovering, the nurse invites me to go out and
pee
(as she puts it) on the front lawn, rather than bring me a bed-pan during the night — this hospital is very primitive.

We are still living in the unventilated tractor shed and it's there that I return to convalesce. The October heat is stifling and I'm alone all day. Under the bed are stacked the boxes with our wedding presents and other belongings, waiting for our house to be built. I am lying comatose in the heat, watching the clever little gecko lizards crawl on the walls around me, bleaching themselves almost transparent to match the concrete (they change their colour according to their background), when a snake crawls leisurely out from under the bed on which I'm lying, and crosses the floor. Perhaps there are lots more under there, nests of them. This one is what's known on Rita Island as a
yellerbelly,
a black tree snake with a yellow underside. Not particularly poisonous, they are everywhere. Later I find them slithering up the steps of the new house, festooned along the verandah louvres and even in a dressing-table drawer. This time I spring off the bed like a jack-in-the-box but, as I've nowhere safer to go, I crawl back and tuck my feet in. It takes me a long time to recover.

Soon, too soon according to the doctor, I'm pregnant, after nearly four years of disappointment, and afraid of what is ahead of me, especially of giving birth. I can't imagine myself performing this seemingly impossible athletic feat. I'm also terrified of pain and I'm certain this is going to hurt a lot. The hit-tune of the moment is a bouncy quickstep with a New Orleans flavour called the ‘Bonaparte's Retreat':

And so I held her in my arms
and told her of her many charms
and kissed her while the dance-band played
the Bonaparte's Retreat

This jaunty tune runs through my head all day long and quite possibly influences the baby's later career as a musician, if you believe in prenatal influence. On the other hand, if such influence does exist the baby should be quite unstable. Its mother spends the entire nine months out of her mind in a heady mixture of bliss and absolute terror.

It's at this time, when we are both triumphant and congratulating one another on achieving, after so long, what most couples do quite easily and sometimes regret, that a terrible tragedy befalls my husband's family back on the farm outside Grafton. As well as the three older boys, all returned safely from the second war, there is a younger son, now nearly eighteen and sixteen years younger than my husband. He is a favourite with everyone and is currently working with his father on the farm. He falls suddenly ill and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; within months he is dead. The doctor who operates on him in Sydney is considered the best in the world, sent for to operate on the American General Patton in France in the closing months of the war, yet even he can do nothing.

At our distance we are helpless, without even the airfare for LF to fly to Sydney to see him before he dies. The wife of a neighbour who has been banking the child endowment money for years — often the only money that a woman can call her own — hears about this and without any hesitation lends him thirty pounds, enough to make the long flight through Brisbane to Sydney. He finds his young brother already blind, his head swathed in bandages after the unsuccessful operation. He's been listening to the radio in the ward and manages to sing the words of the latest hit — ‘The Bonaparte's Retreat'. He sings this song and waits to die at eighteen while I, far to the north and not much older, am creating new life to the rhythms of the same silly jingle. There must be some meaning to this.

My husband stays for a few days then, as the situation is hopeless, starts on the long journey back. He hitches a flight from Kingsford Smith aerodrome to Brisbane on a cargo plane piloted by an old flying mate, then boards the Sunlander without enough of the thirty pounds left to buy meals on the way. He's starving by the time he reaches Rockhampton station but decides to have a (free) shower and change into clean clothes. Just as the train is about to pull out of the station, he finds a forgotten one-pound note in the pocket of his spare trousers, a small miracle but more than enough to buy a railway pie, or several. Soon after his return we get the telegram we are dreading, but too late for either of us to go to the funeral, even if we could find the money for another trip. The old couple travel back from Sydney to Grafton by train with their son's coffin in the baggage car behind them, their lives ruined. It's a bitter irony that this old man who has seen so many young men die must now, at a time when all seems safe, lose the one he cherishes most. He leaves the farm in the care of a share-farmer, buys a house in Grafton and within a couple of years is dead, supposedly as a delayed result of his war injuries but clearly of a broken heart.

Meanwhile, determined to conquer my fear, I study Dr Grantley Dick Read's
The Revelation of Childbirth,
which promotes a theory of effortless, painless childbirth that is, at this time, sweeping through the world of women. It's a pernicious theory in that it brands as a failure any woman, and perhaps the majority of women, who can't quite carry it out. The doctor has been
coucheur
to the nobility in England and spices his account with anecdotes of aristocratic childbirth. He tells for instance of one duchess overcome with shame when she passes wind as she bears down during labour
(Don't mention it, Your Grace, it's quite natural!).
His theory is full of self-righteous male authority. If women suffer it's their own fault; they're not relaxed enough, haven't persevered with his exercises. I prefer the honest Rita Island response —
I'm paying so I'll scream if I want to!
Nevertheless each day I do every single thing that Dr Grantley Dick Read asks, no matter how seemingly futile. I do breathing, stretching and pelvic exercises, lying all alone on the polished floorboards and hoping for the best. At the same time I listen attentively to stories of excruciating foul-ups among my women friends.
I'm paying so I'll scream if I want to
comes from one who's been slapped and told to shut up during a difficult labour in the Ayr Hospital.

I should mention that hospital treatment is free in Queensland at this time, a matter of great pride for the state. Because it's free it's spread very thin. There's none of the pain relief for childbirth, such as nitrous oxide gas, which is considered standard in the south. There's one other factor: none of my friends will go to a Catholic doctor for we're quite convinced that in an emergency he would save the baby and let the mother die. The hospital gynaecologist is a Catholic so I pay to go to a private doctor, Dr Taylor, known as
Squizzy,
as is every Australian man with the surname Taylor. Similarly all Clarks are
Nobby,
all Martins
Plugger
and all redheads (except my husband)
Blue.
These nicknames are universal, their origin hidden somewhere in our folklore. At this time the fee for delivering a baby, including pre- and post-natal care, is three guineas, about half the average weekly wage, and no-one would dream of suing the doctor no matter how badly things go wrong. A brain-damaged child? An incompatible blood transfusion which kills the mother? I've heard of both of these and they're regarded as deplorable but unfortunate accidents. No-one rushes for a lawyer.

Before I go to hospital I have one more emergency, a cane fire which escapes and burns right up to the house. During the crushing season patches of cane are burned on Sunday afternoons and perhaps mid-week as well. The aim is to burn off the trash (and all the rats, snakes and toads) leaving bare black stalks for cutting. A cane fire is an awesome sight and occasionally a farmer or cutter has been caught in one and badly burned. However it's possible to isolate and burn a patch, even in the centre of the cane field, by pushing a two-foot break around it, then lighting it on either side so that the walls of flame roar towards the centre, sizzling and crackling and belching smoke, sparks and a flurry of black streamers. The air is heavy with the stench of burnt sugar, and the sooty floaters drift and spiral, stick to any washing still on the line and fall like black snow on the lawn. It's inevitable that sooner or later the high grass between the cane fields will catch, the flames will roar towards our house, surrounding it, and then away through all the uncleared land on the island. Chooks, dogs and, in this particular case a mother cat with kittens, have to be brought to safety near the house. Nothing is as secretive as a cat with kittens and this one only reveals her hiding place and darts into it as the flames reach it. I scoop them all up into my skirt with the fire flickering at my face (it's that or roasted kittens) and stagger back to the house, my lungs full of smoke. Each of my births at Rita Island is closely preceded by a cane fire roaring right up to and threatening my small green patch of civilisation.

This is not the place to talk about the horrors of childbirth; enough to say that I leave Dr Grantley Dick Read behind at the door together with all personal rights, for the patients are treated like naughty children who need discipline. I lie in exquisite agony on a cot outside the labour ward, listening to the bellows of the woman who precedes me, and waiting my turn in a queue of women stretching back to Eve and forward into eternity. This is the clover chain in its most basic form, and I must endure it. What affronts me most is the impersonality of the carers. During the long time that I'm in labour I am examined often by a doctor who is a stranger to me; the hospital has mistakenly entered his name on my admission form. He comes with the matron, examines me, makes some discouraging comment and departs without a word. This is the doctor who operated on my husband's neck and he is avoided by many of the women because of one of his procedures. Other doctors repair any tears at the time of birth when a natural anaesthetic is operative, but he prefers to take the mother back into the theatre the next morning and stitch her up without any anaesthetic. I'm not sure whether this has some basis in medical theory but I'm certainly more terrified by him than by the birth process itself. At the last minute my own doctor turns up, full of apologies for the mistake, gives me an anaesthetic and drags the baby into the world.