The Road from Coorain (9 page)

When we emerged, there were several feet of sand piled up against the windbreak to my mother’s garden, the contours of new sandhills were beginning to form in places where the dust eddied and collected. There was no question that there were also
many more bare patches where the remains of dry grass and herbage had lifted and blown away.

It was always a miracle to me that animals could endure so much. As we checked the property, there were dead sheep in every paddock to be sure, but fewer than I’d feared. My spirits began to rise and I kept telling my father the damage was not too bad. “That was only the first storm,” he said bleakly. He had seen it all before and knew what was to come.

In June, at shearing time, we hired one of the district’s great eccentrics to help in the yards. I could not manage mustering and yard work at the same time, and my father could not manage both either without too frenetic a pace. Our helper, known as Pommy Goodman, was a middle-aged Englishman with a perfect Mayfair accent, one of the foulest mouths I ever heard, and the bearing of one to the manner born. He was an example of the wonderful variety of types thrown up like human driftwood on the farther shores of settlement in Australia. One moment he would be swearing menacingly at a sheep that had kicked him, the next minute addressing me as though he were my nanny and about to order nursery tea. I resented being called “child,” and noticed that Pommy did more leaning on the fence and offering advice than hard work. But it was good to have a third person on hand, and especially someone who could drive a car, something I could not do, my legs not yet being long enough to disengage a clutch. Pommy could drive ahead and open a gate, making the return of sheep to a paddock a simple task. He could shuttle between the house and woolshed on the endless errands that materialized during the day, and he could count out the sheep from the shearers’ pens, something I was not good at because my mathematical labors by correspondence were always done slowly and deliberately. The sheep raced for freedom at a furious pace, leaping through the gate in twos and threes, so that my counts were often jumbled. The shearers, by now old friends, knowing that my father was not well, tolerated my efforts and secretly kept their own tally, so the records were straight at the end of the day.

After helping at crutching time, Pommy, by now a friend to me, took the job of postmaster at our little post office and manual telephone exchange in Mossgiel. There he was as bossy as he had been to me in the sheepyards, listening to everyone’s conversations, offering his own comments at crucial points in people’s communication, and opening and closing the service at arbitrary hours. It soon became clear that he was drinking heavily, alone every night in the postmaster’s cramped quarters. His slight frame grew emaciated and when I came with my father to the post office he barely had the spirit to correct my grammar. One morning, about three months after he left us, the exchange was dead. No one paid much attention, thinking that he was taking longer than usual to sober up. His first customer of the day found him swinging from the central beam of the post office, fully dressed in suit and tie. He had been sober enough to arrange the noose efficiently and kick the chair he stood on well across the room. I could never go there again without eyeing the beam and wondering about his thoughts that night. What old sorrows had overwhelmed him? Or was he simply a victim of loneliness and depression? I wondered whether his inner dialogue that night was in the voice of a cultivated Englishman, or in that of a foul-mouthed drover. He came to be one of my symbols for our need for society, and of the folly of believing that we can manage our fate alone.

I was used to worry about my father’s health and state of mind, but it was a shock in the spring of 1943 to learn that my mother must go to Sydney for a hysterectomy, surgery that, in the current state of Australian medicine, still required months of recuperation. She left for Sydney shortly before the boys arrived home from school for the Christmas holidays. I was sent for an anticipated month’s stay with friends who lived thirty miles away from us on a station with the poetic name Tooralee. My hosts had an only child, a daughter, then about five years old, and slow to speak for lack of the talkative child company my visit was to supply. My mother was, in fact, away for eight weeks. She had
caught a cold the day before entering the hospital for her surgery, and that infection had progressed quickly to pneumonia, a dangerous infection in the period before antibiotics or sulfa drugs. When she returned, stepping off the silver-painted diesel train in Ivanhoe into a temperature of 108 degrees, she was startlingly pale and thin. My father began to order us to lift packages, to jump to do the household chores, and to work in our amateurish way at tending her garden. She refused all well-intentioned efforts to make her an invalid. “My surgeon says his stitches are very strong,” she said. “I can lift anything. I will have all my energy back in three months.” So she did; but we never again saw the rosy-cheeked, robust woman of our childhood. She remained painfully thin.

As we entered the late summer of 1944, we had about half our usual stock of sheep, now seriously affected by inadequate nourishment. It was clear that they would not make it through the summer unless it rained, or we began to feed them hay or grain to supplement their diet. The question which tormented my parents was whether to let them die, or invest more in maintaining them. If they died, fifteen years of careful attention to the bloodlines was lost. Yet even if fed supplements they might die anyway, for the dry feed would not supply the basic nutrients in fresh grass and herbage.

Now the nighttime conversations were anguished. Both of them had grown up fearing debt like the plague. It hurt their pride to mortgage the land, just like more feckless managers. Furthermore, the feeding would require more labor than my father and I could manage. In the end, it was resolved to borrow the money, buy the wheat, and hire the help. But these actions were taken with a heavy heart. My father was plagued by doubts about the wisdom of the decision. My mother, once settled on a course of action, was imperturbable. Their basic difference of temperament was that she lacked imagination and could not conceive of failure, while my father’s imagination now tormented
him with ever darker visions of disaster. She regarded this fevered imagination dourly and thought it should be controllable. He tried to keep his worst fears to himself.

Our help came in the wonderful form of two brothers, half aboriginal, half Chinese. The elder brother, Ron, in his early twenties, was light-skinned and slightly slant-eyed; the younger, Jack, looked like a full-blooded aboriginal. They came from the mission station in Menindee, one hundred and seventy miles away. They were as fine a pair of station hands as one could ever hope for. Ron could fix engines and manage all things mechanical. He was quiet, efficient, and totally dependable. Jack could talk to animals, soothe a frightened horse, persuade half-starving sheep to get up and keep walking. Jack could pick up a stone and toss it casually to knock down out of the sky the crows gathering around a foundered animal. He could track anything: snakes, sheep, kangaroos, lizards. Jack’s only defect so far as station management was concerned was that at any time he might feel the aboriginal need to go “on walkabout.” He was utterly reliable and would always reappear to complete the abandoned task he’d been at work on when the urge came. But he could be gone for days, or weeks, or months.

Feeding the sheep was hard work. Feed troughs made of metal could not be considered because the drifting sand would quickly cover them. If the weaker sheep were to get their nourishment, the expanse of feeding troughs must be large so that every animal would have its chance at the grain. So we settled on burlap troughs hung on wire—light enough for the wind to blow beneath when empty, cheap enough to produce in hundred-foot lengths. Replacement lengths became available each time we emptied a hundredweight bag of wheat. With a bag needle and a hank of twine at hand anyone could mend the troughs, or with a little wire and some wooden pegs, create new ones.

When we began our feeding program in the troughs placed by major watering places, the sheep seemed only slowly to discover the grain. Within a few weeks the hungry animals would stampede
at the sight of anyone carrying bags of wheat, and someone had to be sent as a decoy to draw them off in search of a small supply of grain while the major ration was being poured into the troughs. Since I could carry only twenty pounds at a fast run, I was the decoy while the men carried forty- and fifty-pound bags on their shoulders to empty into the feeding troughs. At first the sheep were ravenous but measured in following the decoy. Soon they would race so hard toward the grain that they would send the decoy flying unless he or she outraced them. Then they would pause, wheel on catching the scent of the ration in the troughs, and stampede back toward the food.

Our principal enemies as we carried out this daily process were the pink cockatoos and crows, which tore the burlap to pieces in search of the grains of wheat left behind. Soon the mending of the troughs was a daily task, a task made miserable by the blowflies, the blistering sun, the blowing sand, and the stench of the bodies of the sheep for whom the wheat had arrived too late.

For my father each death was a personal blow, and he took himself to task for the suffering of the animals. Our conversations as we rode about the place took on a grimmer tone. “When I’m gone, Jill, sell this place. Take care of your mother. Make sure she goes to the city. There’s nothing but heartbreak in fighting the seasons.” Or, “If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll take care of your mother. Make her sell this place. Don’t let her stay here.” I would promise anything to change his mood and get the conversation on another topic. But I rarely succeeded. Usually he would go on to talk about my future, a future in which he clearly did not expect to share. “Work hard, Jill,” he’d say. “Don’t just waste time.
Make something of yourself.
” Reverting to his idée fixe that my brothers did not try hard enough at their schoolwork, he would continue, “Don’t be like your brothers. Don’t waste your time in school. Get a real education and get away from this damn country for good.” I would promise, choking back tears at the thought of his death and a future away from Coorain. But even I could see that he was right about the battle
with the seasons. Without discussing the subject with anyone, I concluded that the God who was supposed to heed the fall of the sparrow had a lesser morality than humans. Each clap of dry thunder and each vista of starving animals made the notion of a loving God a mockery. I kept my father’s words about impending death to myself. I was used to being the listener to fears and worries my parents needed to express, but did not want to worry one another about. It seemed too monstrous a possibility to speak about, and in a primitive way I feared that naming it might make it happen.

One troublesome aspect of the frustration of my parents’ dreams was the extent to which they transferred their ambitions to their children. My brothers, being five hundred miles away, were not readily available as vehicles for ambition. Being at hand, I became the focus of all the aspiration for achievement that had fueled both parents’ prodigious energies. My correspondence school required little of my time and less energy. My teacher’s reports were always positive and my work praised. Naturally, it should have been, for I had heard the same lessons discussed in the schoolroom by my brothers and their governess.

I read omnivorously, everything that came to hand, and through reading my mother’s books I asked questions about politics and history which both parents took for signs of high intelligence. Lacking playmates, I would retreat from the adult world to my swing, set away in the eucalyptus trees a hundred yards or so from the house. There I would converse at length with imaginary companions, usually characters from some recently read novel or war correspondent’s report, which I only dimly understood. I would kick furiously in order to rise up higher and see a little farther beyond the horizon. In the midst of my dreams of glory drawn from highly glamorized accounts of war and feats of heroism, I would sometimes stop crestfallen and wonder if I would ever get away from Coorain. Sometimes, needing to be alone, I would walk for hours, scanning the ground for aboriginal ovens, collecting quartz fragments, observing the insect life—anything
to be away from the house and its overwhelming mood of worry.

The nighttime conversations now made me nervous because they frequently settled on what a remarkable child I was, and how gratifying it would be for parents to observe my progress. I had no way of assessing their judgments, but I was certainly uncomfortably aware that I and my performance in life had become the focus of formidable emotional energies.

Like all children, I was occasionally mischievous and misbehaved. In more carefree times my pranks, like my brothers’, met with swift punishment from parents who believed that sparing the rod was certain to spoil the child. The occasional token chastisement was easy to resist psychologically. One had only to refuse to apologize and express contrition for enough hours to gain the upper hand on parents who were tired in the evening and wanted to go to bed. Now, however, I encountered more subtle, and to me more terrifying, punishments. If I misbehaved, my parents simply acted as though I were not their child but a stranger. They would inquire civilly as to who I was and what I was doing on Coorain, but no hint of recognition escaped them. This treatment never failed to reduce me to abject contrition. In later life my recurring nightmares were always about my inability to prove to people I knew quite well who I was. I became an unnaturally good child, and accepted uncritically that goodness was required of me if my parents’ disappointments in life were ever to be compensated for.

That June most of our older sheep were too weak to be shorn. My father took the few whose wool was worth shearing and who could stand the journey to a neighboring station, since the numbers were too small to warrant bringing a shearing team to Coorain. On the first day of his absence, my mother also left in the afternoon to pick up the mail and carry out some other errands. I had time to fulfill an often neglected promise to my brother Bob that I would listen on his shortwave radio every
afternoon and record the stations and countries I heard. That day, the sixth of June, I turned the dial to the point where we had discovered that we could hear the uncensored news being dictated to General MacArthur’s headquarters. To my astonishment, I heard the impassive announcer’s voice report the news of the Allied landing in Normandy, and the establishment of beachheads beyond Utah and Omaha beaches literally only a few hours earlier. By the time my mother returned in the late afternoon, I was gibbering with excitement and almost incoherent with my news. She listened carefully, sorted out the story, and promised to tell my father when he telephoned that evening. This she did, although the evening Australian news contained no report of the landing. I was not vindicated until the six o’clock news the following night, when the Australian censors decided to release the news of the successful landings. Thereafter, no matter what the circumstances on Coorain, I could always distract my father by reading him reports of the campaign on the various fronts in Europe as we jolted about Coorain in our sulky, traveling to clean watering troughs or mend our feeding troughs. I could supplement the newspaper accounts by the more accurate reporting which I heard on my brother’s radio, where the actual figures of casualties were reported rather than the bland announcements made for civilian consumption. Reading about the invasion in Europe was reassuring because our own situation in Australia had grown more precarious as the war in the Pacific unfolded.