Roundabout at Bangalow Page 11

  The sands of the desert are sodden red,

  Red with the blood of a square that broke,

  The gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead

  And the regiment’s blind with the dust and smoke …

  This, I take it, refers to some last-ditch stand of a British regiment, perhaps against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift, but nothing could be further from the soul of our gentle teacher who encourages us to write only about what we know and have experienced. Our literature, our stories about ourselves, our folklore, our legends, are to be found in places like the Bulletin. Our teacher goes home each night and writes his stories about us and our lives, yet each day is required to force-feed us with the literature of Empire. No-one at the time notices this strange discrepancy.

  This high school at which I spend the first five years of wartime is oblivious to the changes taking place in the wider world. The big river which flows through the town is, on the other hand, a symbol of permanence or, better still, of both change and permanence.

  The river flows on and on, the tide rises and falls as it washes against the island, the bridge, the butter-factory wharf, the NCSN wharves, the ferry approaches, the sailing club and the convent playing fields. What does the river murmur? Forgive? But for what? For the greed with which the valley was stripped and the forest giants turned into furniture for the dining-rooms of the rich? For a different kind of greed, that of an old soldier who marries a sixteen-year-old bride and fathers too many children? For anyone who would murder a child and hide the body in the concrete pylon of a bridge? Or for the killing or dispersal of a whole race of the dark people?

  Where are the Aborigines at this time? Save for the black tracker in his smart uniform they are invisible, out of sight and out of mind. Many, but too few, are hidden away in settlements on Ulgundahi Island in the lower Clarence, where they are treated like naughty children, or at Angourie on the sea coast, where the women are vulnerable to harassment by car-loads of white men. Another group is up river at Baryulgil, where the men work in the asbestos mine long after the dangers of asbestos are known. The asbestos tailings are used to beautify the yards of the little wooden houses and to cover the school playground. The dust rises in a thick cloud as the children play ‘skippies’ and ‘hopscotch’ and small black faces and bodies are powdered white. The ‘white death’, where the lungs are coughed up with the blood and sputum, follows inevitably. There is much to forgive.

  DuRING MY YEARS from twelve to sixteen the world is at war. How do children cope in a dangerous world? They are, most of the time, self-absorbed: many live an underwater life, drifting and dreaming, reading and escaping into unreal worlds, and this is certainly true of me, chief drifter and dreamer. A child can sit on the long stool behind the kitchen table at mealtimes and listen to the furious discussion of world events, but never of course join in — Say grace! Sit up straight! Get your elbows off the table! Events pass over our heads in a steady stream. We absorb it all and fall in enthusiastically with the views of our parents yet it is never quite real. It seems like some distant hullabaloo which can’t possibly threaten the accustomed ways of school, the family or the inner drama of growing up.

  The heated discussion in our house is always from the point of view of the working man, the underdog. My father is the Union Rep. for the Australian Meat Industry Employees Union at the meatworks. He collects subscriptions to the AMIEU, calls the meetings, stirs the workers when necessary, brings the union papers home packed neatly in a small suitcase and does all the paperwork on the kitchen table, with my mother’s help. On political matters they are always in agreement. Their hero is Jack Lang, the big fella, who instituted child endowment, made sure it was paid only to the mothers and, during the Depression, placed a moratorium on the banks so that they couldn’t seize a man’s home or his tools of trade. Union organisers come and go as guests in our home and each election occasions a ferment of political discussion, spilling out into the street meetings where my father heckles Dr Earle Page (later Sir), our local Member of Parliament.

  We are saturated with the newsreels and their version of events. World figures — the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, Hitler and Mussolini, Haile Selassie, Neville Chamberlain and, later, General MacArthur himself — loom grotesquely on the black and white screen above us, march towards us, declaim and fade away. They mould our judgements which are just as black and white, for we are unsophisticated people. We see the Prince of Wales comforting the unemployed in grey and distant Welsh valleys and know nothing of his decadent life. Later, when we learn more, we despise the hatchet-faced Mrs Simpson with her Chanel dresses and severe hairdo. She has brought down the King who was to have championed the working class. Like most Australians we see him as a victim, forced by Stanley Baldwin to bow out in order to preserve an Establishment which most Australians heartily distrust.

  On the newsreels we see Chamberlain looking like a scrawny old rabbit, descending from his plane waving a piece of white paper which, he says, promises peace in our time. He has crawled to Hitler to get his piece of white paper, and Australians are disgusted. My father despises both crawlers and Pommies, and Chamberlain is both. Our Prime Minister is known to all as Pig-Iron Bob. Over the protests of the steelworkers and the whar-fies, Menzies has sold scrap metal to the Japanese, even though it’s obvious that they’re planning to attack us, torture and kill us, and take over the world. When he announces that we are at war because Britain is, and immediately hands the Australian navy over to British control, as if we in the Pacific don’t matter at all, there isn’t a murmur. We are automatically at war because the Mother Country is; it’s as simple as that.

  At first both Hitler and Mussolini are figures of fun, and songs of ridicule ring out from the bakelite wirelesses on the mantelpieces of most Australian kitchens: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run! means that the funny little Führer with the toothbrush mo is on the run. Everyone is certain that he’ll be a pushover, that we’ll hang out our washing on the Ziegfried Line, if the Ziegfried Line’s still there! Victory follows victory and we witness them on the newsreels or listen in on the wireless. We are euphoric. The battle of the River Plate, where the German pocket battleship Graf Spee is scuttled rather than surrender, is broadcast like a cricket match; we cheer as the ship goes down. The Italian light cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni is sunk by the Sydney in the Mediterranean and the Italian army is defeated and captured in their hundreds of thousands in faraway and romantic places such as Bardia and Mersa Matruh. Many of the Italian prisoners are sent out to work on Australian farms where they mix with the Australian farmworkers, distinguished from them only by their dark red work uniforms.

  When Japan bombs Pearl Harbour everything changes. Slit trenches are dug in the school grounds and we have air-raid practice. We dive chattering and laughing into the rough trenches, skinning our knees. We knit scarves and socks, hundreds of them, as if this war is, as it was last time, in the frozen trenches of northern France. We practise with gas masks. We learn morse code and flag drill. Each child has a flag and we practise semaphore, as if our faltering dots and dashes, fluttering from hilltop to hilltop, will save us from the enemy, who are shown daily in cartoons as degenerates, bow-legged and short-sighted and obviously no match for white men. After the fall of Singapore we are terrified. At this time the Sixth Division retreats through Greece and Crete; the Eighth Division surrenders to the Japanese in Singapore; the Japanese bomb Darwin and Broome. Tobruk is beseiged; Rommel wins back most of the conquests in the Middle East and the men of the AIF, those who are not dead in the desert or slaving on the Burma Railway, begin to come home to protect us.

  With the outbreak of war Australians have gained a new purpose, a cause. And so the young men have begun to disappear, bound they think for honour and adventure. The country halls at Southgate, Carrs Creek, Alumny Creek and Tucabia ring with speeches and presentations as one send-off follows another. Only the parents, sitting proudly yet miserably while the fulsome farewells on behalf
of the community are spoken, think back to the Great War, to the harvest of telegrams spread far and wide, to the lonely graves by the Somme and the unbearable sadness of the Last Post on Anzac Day. The photographer’s window in Prince Street is soon stripped of the portraits of Jacaranda Queens, of debutantes and wedding-cake brides with trains spread out in rippling pools. Now we see rows of smiling faces in uniform, either of the AIF in their rough khaki, or the RAAF in smart navy-blue (nicknamed blue orchids), and one or two very cheeky sailors. There are so many that the window display is continually being changed.

  Where do they go, all these smiling faces? Some disappear into the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme in Canada. They send home glamorous photos of themselves posing in groups — my crew — beside evil-looking birds of war before they leave for the Battle of Britain. Some will fly spitfires in dogfights over Kent and Essex, others will fly fleets of bombers north-east almost to the Arctic Circle, glimpsing the fabulous Aurora Borealis on their left, or east over the Rhine and the Marne, dropping their bombs on dockyards, railway yards, munition factories, cathedrals — and families. Some will come back but others will fall, far down in flaming auroras, haloed by the burning fragments of their planes. They will light up the sky over Berlin, Stuttgart, Dresden and Bremen.

  Those who join the AIF will sail to the Middle East on luxury liners, now stripped of their splendid fittings, and tread in their fathers’ fading footprints. They will pose before the pyramids, visit the brothels of Alexandria, the Mount of Olives and the Holy Sepulchre and fight the Black Watch in Jerusalem. One will blow out the light on the supposed tomb of Jesus, remarking that it has been burning for far too long. He will be dragged away by the provos (the military police) and beaten up, the wailing priests will re-light the everlasting flame and the whole episode will be hushed up. History will repeat itself in many ways: Australians in their slouch hats will stride arrogantly down the Street Called Straight in Damascus and see snow for the first time in remote Syrian valleys. They will taste defeat in Greece and Crete, blame Winston Churchill as the architect of yet one more Australian disaster, and curse him as their fathers did at Gallipoli.

  Farm boys, used to lying on their backs in the kikuyu grass on the banks of Carrs Creek, Alumny Creek or the Coldstream, watching the brolgas circling high in the sky, will look up in amazement at alien skies, strange stars, and German dive bombers circling and strafing like birds of prey.

  One of them lies on his back in a tent somewhere in Palestine. He has with him only two things he values: the gold Rolex on his wrist, carefully covered with a button-down leather flap, and his chromatic harmonica — the kind that every farm boy plays at the time. But he is different. In his hands it sings. Its mellow, reedy strains spin and quiver, rise and fall in the desert air. They tell of the mysterious rise and fall of the tide in a big river on the other side of the world, of the way the black soil curls back from the ploughshare, of fields of ripening corn with their roots deep down in the flood mud, of the heavy scent of the magnolia in bloom beside his home, of the joy of life and the sadness of its parting. One hand curves lover-like around its mellow music, cherishing, vibrating, shaping, controlling its spells.

  He stops abruptly, taps out the moisture, wipes the instrument on his thigh and puts it and his dreams away. Soon he will receive a Christmas parcel from the Parents and Citizens of the Grafton High School, his old school. It will be sewn up in calico, so carefully and tightly that he will have to open it with his bayonet. Slipped inside the calico will be a cheeky greeting from the fourteen-year-old girl who has stitched it up. He thinks of home, wishes momentarily that he was there, writes a note of thanks and turns to other things.

  He will be lucky in many ways. He will be waiting on the dock at Alexandria, his kitbag packed for Greece when the retreat is ordered, and so he doesn’t go. He has a brief reprieve, but his younger brother is captured in Singapore.

  My father is also lucky. He receives an urgent invitation from an old friend at The Channon to enlist with him: Let’s go together, it’s good to have a mate. My mother puts on a memorable scene; she’s not going to be deserted again. He hesitates and in the meantime manpower is restricted and he’s frozen in a protected industry. The mate is captured by the Japanese and buried beside the Burma Railway. Many more of the AIF will sink into the mud of the Kokoda Trail, or fall at Buna and Gona or die of malaria or swamp fever in tent hospitals in the jungle. Children who have never known grandfathers because of the First World War will grow up without fathers because of the Second. Australia, and South Grafton, will never be the same again.

  And it isn’t only the young whose lives are transformed. Old men who’d been content to dream away the remainder of their lives in the sun on the verandah, shake themselves into new energy, enlist in the Volunteer Defence Corps (the Dads’ Army of that time) and camp by remote beaches known forever after as Wire Fence or Diggers’ Headland. They stand no chance if the Japanese land, but could perhaps give an early warning. They guard the Grafton Bridge and other so-called strategic points from enemy spies and mine the bridge for instant demolition if the Japanese come. They’re aching to blow up the bridge. They collect pleasure boats, fishing boats and row-boats, all things that float, and hide them on the banks of the Coldstream so that the Japanese will have no way of crossing the river. They do this with an air of officious satisfaction. At least one farmer, my future father-in-law, threatens to shoot them and keeps his boat. Plans are made to evacuate the coastal plain, with humans and animals to be driven to the tablelands. Meanwhile no-one is idle; men who haven’t worked for a decade because of the Depression are conscripted by the Manpower into the Commonwealth Construction Corps. They build roads and airfields in Darwin and the Northern Territory, become rich on the high wages and overtime, and richer still by running two-up schools for their bored mates. They’ve never had it so good. All manpower is conscripted into the armed services or industry, and butter, sugar, tea, clothing and petrol (for those few who have cars) are rationed. Women take over men’s jobs and must by law be paid the same rates of pay. When the men return these women will be dismissed and the jobs handed back, but women will always remember the easy money during the war.

  A West Australian batallion of the militia (known as chockos or chocolate soldiers because they are conscripts, not volunteers) camps on the hill near where the South Grafton golf course now stands. The batallion comes stealthily in the night and departs just as stealthily, leaving the debris of an army camp on the hillside and at least one girl to face the music. The baby disappears, no doubt adopted, and her life returns to normal. Or does it? We learn later that these boys, mostly eighteen-year-olds and untrained, go straight to New Guinea to face the Japanese at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Track, defeating them for the first time. They hold back the Japanese until the AIF and the Americans arrive and are never called chockos again.

  An Australian division, the Sixth, returns from the Middle East and is rushed from Melbourne through Sydney and straight to New Guinea. Prime Minister Curtin has insisted, against all Churchill’s arguments, that this division return to defend Australia. Churchill, perhaps enraged, perhaps genuinely short of ships, refuses a naval escort.

  The Westernlander, a Dutch ship, sneaks out of the harbour at Colombo in the dead of night, carrying an Australian artillery regiment, their guns and equipment. Intended for the defence of the Dutch East Indies, which has since fallen to the Japanese, they have been in Ceylon for nearly three months. They are now alone in a trackless ocean patrolled by Japanese submarines. They head due south, straight for the pole.

  He lies alone on the deck each night, sleepless on his pallet in the salty air, always cold, sometimes drenched with sea-spray He has a horror of being caught below if the ship goes down. The stars and planets group and re-group in the heavens above him. The northern constellations stream away behind him, along with the aromatic and spice-laden air of Ceylon, its steamy harbour, its cool uplands and tea plantations, and the Souther
n Cross rises triumphant before his face. The tattoo on his upper arm, a kangaroo holding an Australian flag, done in a back street in Colombo while on the run from the provos, is now regretted. He’ll keep it hidden for the rest of his life. His memories are not regretted. They’re replete and he’s bringing them home.

  Curtin, alone in his frugal room in the Hotel Canberra, is one of the few who knows that this is the most perilous moment of the war: the Sixth Division is at sea, plunging south through the Indian Ocean without an escort, the Eighth is lost in Singapore and the Ninth is left behind to face Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein. His mind, sleepless, moves upon the water. Anxious as any parent, he refuses to rest until he knows they are beyond the reach of submarines, coming home.

  Meanwhile, back home, strange planes fill the skies and crash around us. An Airacobra crashes on the railway line at Carrs Creek, one wing neatly sheared off by the railway gates, and the pilot walks away. He is probably from an American aircraft carrier off the coast. One witness, a small boy at the time, recalls the laid-back way the crash is handled. We are, after all, far from the action:

  Our teacher led the charge across Miss Sanders’ cornfield to the scene of the crash which was about five hundred metres away … The pilot was getting into a car at the corner of Broad Street and Back Lane and the plane was surrounded by ‘Dad’s Army’ … The port wing was shorn off on one post, one post was knocked out of the ground and the plane had come to rest leaning against a third straddling the railway line … A locomotive choofed out from Grafton to have a look and went back. A crawler tractor came from somewhere and the plane was pulled clear of the railway line … A ‘fence’ was erected around the wreckage and guarded by ‘Dad’s Army’. A tent was set up by the soldiers and one night a storm came up and blew it over and the soldiers forgot about their top secret charge and spent the remainder of the night at the Blue Goose [the local pub].