The Road from Coorain (10 page)

We had been jolted out of complacency by the fall of Singapore, the supposedly impregnable British naval base, fortified with guns which pointed only out to sea. My mother and I had been on a brief trip to Sydney when Singapore fell. The newspaper headlines covered the whole front page of the afternoon dailies. So great was the shock that Australians, the most taciturn of people, had actually been moved to speak about the news to total strangers. Handfuls of refugees began to arrive from Hong Kong, but there were none from Singapore, except the Australian
commander, Major-General Gordon Bennett, who we were ashamed to learn had deserted his men. Many of our friends and sons of friends had been in the Australian contingent at Singapore, including our fondly remembered Jimmie Walker. We had his smiling picture in his A.I.F. uniform sent just before his departure. The news of Japanese treatment of prisoners and the atrocities committed upon the civilian population of the Philippines made the increasing likelihood of the invasion of Australia seem more threatening.

My parents’ conversations on this possibility were chilling but practical. Australia was drained of able-bodied men, away fighting in Europe and the Middle East. These two proudly loyal subjects of the British crown had thrilled to the sound of Churchill’s speeches hurling defiance at Hitler, invoking the glory of the British Empire to inspire the defense of England. They were correspondingly shaken to realize that Australia was expendable in Britain’s war strategy, and that the Australian government had had great difficulty in securing the return of the battle-scarred Ninth Division from Tobruk to take part in the defense of Australia. Once this was clear they turned soberly to consideration of what to do in the event of an invasion. They calculated correctly that the continent was too vast to be easily overrun, that the Japanese would concentrate on the ports and the food supplies. We, who were hardy backcountry people, could disappear if need be into the great outback desert and live off the land like aborigines. There were various plans for getting the boys home, and discussions about how that might be achieved in a time of likely national panic. When the call came for civilians to turn over all their hunting rifles to the government to help arm the militia, a pitifully small group of men who had refused to serve overseas when drafted, my father kept back one of his rifles and hid it with a supply of ammunition. If we were ever in danger of capture, he and my mother had calmly agreed that he would shoot his wife and children first and then himself. In preparation for such dire possibilities, we hid supplies in a remote part of Coorain. The
gasoline was described as a cache to be reserved for emergencies, and we never spoke about the need for a weapon.

We had very realistic expectations about the defense of Australia, because it was patently apparent that there was a failure of leadership in the country, symbolized by Major-General Gordon Bennett’s ignominious flight, the flustered performance of the first wartime leader, the United Australian Party Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and the short-lived Country Party government which followed. The task of defending the country was impossible for Australians alone, and the old empire mentalities of our leaders left them, without the protection of Great Britain, as paralyzed as the defenders of Singapore. My parents were rugged individualists who scorned socialism and the Labor Party as the political recourse of those who lacked initiative. Nonetheless, their spirits soared when the Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin, took office, candidly acknowledged our situation, and called for American assistance. They recognized an Australian patriot, and I learned for the first time that loyalty to Great Britain and love for Australia were not synonymous. It was an important lesson.

After the June shearing of 1944, we knew that if it did not rain in the spring our gamble was lost. The sheep would not live through until another rainy season. There were so few to feed by September 1944 that our friends and helpers, Ron and Jack Kelly, left for another job. We on Coorain waited for the rain which never came. The dust storms swept over us every two or three weeks, and there was no pretending about the state of the sheep when we traveled around the property. The smells of death and the carrion birds were everywhere. The starving animals which came to our feed troughs were now demented with hunger. When I ran off as decoy to spread out a thin trail of grain while the troughs were filled, they knocked me over and trampled me, desperate to tear the grain from the bag. Their skeletal bodies were pitiful. I found I could no longer bear to look into their eyes, because the usually tranquil ruminant animals looked half crazed.

We lost our appetite for meat because the flesh of the starving animals already tasted putrid. I was never conscious of when the smell of rotting animals drowned out the perfumes from my mother’s garden, but by early December, although it still bloomed, our nostrils registered only decaying flesh. By then the sand accumulating on the other side of the windbreak was beginning to bend the cane walls inward by its weight, and we knew it was only a matter of time before it too was engulfed.

My mother, as always, was unconquerable. “It has to rain some day,” she told my father. “Our children are healthy. We can grow our food. What does it matter if we lose everything else?” She did not understand that it mattered deeply to him. Other memories of loss from his childhood were overwhelming him. He could not set out in mid-life to be once more the orphan without patrimony. As he sank into deeper depression, they understood one another less. She, always able to rouse herself to action, could not understand how to deal with crippling depression, except by a brisk call to count one’s blessings. This was just what my father was unable to do.

My brothers were summoned home two weeks early from school, though to help with what was not clear. There was pitifully little to do on Coorain. There were the same burlap troughs to mend, the same desperate animals to feed, but the size of the task was shrinking daily. The December heat set in, each day over 100 degrees. Now so much of our land was without vegetation that the slightest breeze set the soil blowing. Even without the dust storms, our daily life seemed lived in an inferno.

My mother’s efforts to rouse my father were indefatigable. One Saturday in early December was to be a meeting of the Pastures Protection Board in Hillston. Early in the week before, she set about persuading him to drive the seventy-five miles with his close friend Angus Waugh. Reluctantly, he agreed. The Friday before, a minor dust storm set in, and he decided against the drive. It was fearfully hot, over 108 degrees, and we passed a fitful evening barricaded in against the blowing sand.

The next morning I awoke, conscious that it was very early, to find my father gazing intently at me. He bent down to embrace me and said good-bye. Half asleep, I bid him good-bye and saw his departing back. Suddenly, I snapped awake.
Why is he saying good-bye? He isn’t going anywhere
. I leapt out of bed, flung on the first clothes to hand, and ran dry-mouthed after him. I was only seconds too late. I ran shouting after his car, “I want to come. Take me with you.” I thought he saw me, but, the car gathering speed, he drove away.

Back in the house, my mother found me pacing about and asked why I was up so early in the morning. I said I’d wanted to go with my father, and wasn’t sure where he went. He was worried about the heat and the adequacy of the water for the sheep in Brooklins (a distant paddock), she said, and had gone to check on it. It was a hot oppressive day, with the wind gaining strength by noon. I felt a leaden fear in my stomach, but was speechless. To speak of my fears seemed to admit that my father had lost his mental balance. It was something I could not say.

His journey should not have taken more than two hours, but then again he could have decided to visit other watering places on the property. When he was not home by two, my mother and Bob set out after him. Neither Barry nor I, left behind, was inclined to talk about what might have happened. Like a pair of automatons, we washed the dishes left from lunch and settled in to wait. When no one returned by four, the hour when my mother stoked the stove and began her preparations for dinner, we went through the motions of her routine. The potatoes were peeled, peas shelled, the roast prepared, the table laid.

Eventually, Bob arrived home alone. There had been an accident, he said. He must make some phone calls and hurry back. We neither of us believed him. We knew my father was dead. Finally, at six o’clock, the old grey utility my father drove hove into sight driven by my brother Bob; my mother’s car followed, with several others in its wake. She took the time to thank us for preparing dinner before saying she had something to tell us alone.
We went numbly to our parents’ bedroom, the place of all confidential conversations. “I want you to help me,” she said. “Your father’s dead. He was working on extending the piping into the Brooklins dam. We found him there in the water.” My eyes began to fill with tears. She looked at me accusingly. “Your father wouldn’t want you to cry,” she said.

We watched woodenly as my father’s body was brought to rest in that same bedroom. We were dismissed while she prepared it for the funeral which would take place in two days. In the hot summer months, burials had to be speedy and there was no need for anyone to explain why to us children. We had been dealing with decaying bodies for years. Because of the wartime restrictions on travel and the need for haste, there was little time to summon family and friends. Telegrams were dispatched but only my mother’s brother and sister-in-law, close to us in Sydney, were actually expected. Eventually, we sat down to dinner and choked over our food, trying desperately to make conversation with the kindly manager from a neighboring station who had come to help. The meal seemed surreal. The food on the plate seemed unconnected to the unreal world without my father in it in which I now lived. I was haunted by the consciousness of his body lying close by in the bedroom, which my mother had sternly forbidden me to enter.

After we went sleeplessly to bed, we heard a sound never heard before, the sound of my mother weeping hopelessly and inconsolably. It was a terrible and unforgettable sound. To moderate the heat we slept on a screened veranda exposed to any southern breeze which might stir. My brother Barry’s bed was next to mine. After listening to this terrible new sound, we both agreed that we wished we were older so that we could go to work and take care of her. We tossed until the sun rose and crept out of bed too shocked to do more than converse in whispers.

My mother soon appeared, tight-lipped and pale, somehow a ghost of herself. Dispensing with all possibility of discussion, she announced that Barry and I were to stay with friends for a few
days. She did not want us to see our father buried, believing that this would be too distressing for us. Though we complied without questioning the plan, I felt betrayed that I would not see him to his last rest. She, for her part, wanted to preserve us from signs of the body’s decay. As we set out, driven by the kindly Morison family, who had cared for me during my mother’s illness, we passed the hearse making its way toward Coorain. Its black shape drove home what had happened.

How my father’s death had actually come about we would never know. He was a poor swimmer, and had attempted to dive down in muddy water to connect a fresh length of pipe so that the pump for watering the sheep could draw from the lowered water level of the dam. It was a difficult exercise for a strong swimmer, and not one to undertake alone. Why he had chosen to do it alone when my two brothers, both excellent swimmers, were at home, we could not understand. I did not tell anyone of his early morning visit to me. I realized that we would never know the answer to the question it raised.

Everyone expected that my mother would sell Coorain, move to the city, and allow a bank or trust company to manage our finances. In our part of the world this was what widows did. Our circle of friends and advisers did not bargain for my mother’s business sense and her strong will. She would not sell the property when it was worth next to nothing. She planned instead to run it herself, wait for the rains which must come, and manage our one asset for our maximum benefit. The boys were to return to school according to the usual schedule. She would hire some help, and she and I would remain at Coorain. Presented with this plan and a request to finance it, her startled woolbrokers remonstrated with her about the hazards of a woman taking charge of her own affairs. Seeing her resolve, they acquiesced, and offered her a loan secured by our now virtually nonexistent sheep. So she returned resolute to preserve and enhance the enterprise she and my father had built.

He had not been a man to give much thought to transferring property to wife or children, and so my mother, as his sole heir, became liable for sizable death duties. Some of my first lessons in feminism came from her outraged conversations with the hapless valuation agent sent to inventory and value the assets of the estate for probate. She was incensed to discover that her original investment in furniture, linen, silver, and household equipment was now merged in my father’s estate. No value was attributed either to the contributions she had made to the enterprise through the investment of her capital fifteen years before, or to the proceeds of her fifteen years of twelve- and fourteen-hour days of labor. Her outspoken anger cowed the man into some concessions, but her rumblings about this economic injustice continued for years, and instructed me greatly.

Heroic as she was, we would not have fared so well in her defiance of the fates had we not been given the affection, support, and physical presence of my mother’s younger brother and his wife. Both worked in essential wartime occupations in Sydney, my uncle as an engineer and my aunt as the senior nurse in a munitions factory. Informed of my father’s death, both requested leave to attend his funeral and to help his widow cope with her loss, and both were refused any more than forty-eight hours’ absence. In characteristic Australian fashion, they defied the manpower authorities, talked their way onto the train for the west despite the restrictions on civilian travel, and arrived to stay shortly before my father’s funeral.