Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  Women students live in a hostel, S. H. Smith House, named I discover later for the brother of Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, the Egyptologist who donated the mummified head of an Egyptian princess to Grafton High School. Smith House once housed the New England Ladies College, a boarding school for the daughters of the gentry, after which it became a popular guest house. In preparation for its new role as a student hostel, care has been taken (the records show) to fumigate it against insect pests, bedbugs, rodents, and consumption. It fronts onto Armidale’s Central Park where a visionary nineteenth-century Italian priest, Father Francis Gatti, has planted a selection of exotic trees, one from each country in the world, and now at their best. This Catholic diocese has a history of Italian priests including, as Bishop of Armidale in the late nineteenth century, Eleazer Torreggiani, one of the few Australian bishops to defend Mary MacKillop when the Irish-Aus-tralian bishops attempted to disband her order. Mary MacKillop and the Josephite sisters will have some importance later in my story.

  Next to the hostel and part of it is Southall, previously home to a succession of Armidale doctors and the scene of an astonishing drama in August 1927 when I was just one month old. The occupant at the time, Dr James Samuel Frederick Barnet, was skilled in the new electrical therapy. While using it to relieve his own severe attack of lumbago, he was distracted by the ringing of the telephone and, unthinking, picked up the receiver to become, like Michael Browne earlier in my story, a human conduit. I try to imagine him in his last living instant, right hand applying the devilish apparatus to his lower back, left hand reaching for the phone, and wonder who made the fatal call and effectively murdered him.

  The doorways of S. H. Smith House are guarded by two oversize marble statues of bare-breasted women, but this is no hothouse of female sexuality; it is as repressive as any boarding school. The warden is Miss E. May Roulston, an imposing woman with an iron-grey moustache, who is determined to turn out models of virtue and deportment, and especially virtue. Our clothes first of all, and it is no accident that our formal dress is a virginal white. We are forbidden to wear cardigans with summer frocks — the height of vulgarity — and counselled against red, a colour which, according to Miss Roulston, is likely to inflame male passions. We must always beware of male passions which are, it seems, always on the brink of arousal, and we’re given a series of instructions to avoid what must be a painful spectacle. Slacks are unfeminine and suggestive; they are to be worn only in the privacy of the inner rooms. Sleeveless frocks are also banned. We are warned by Matron against sitting on cold surfaces (bad kidneys and no babies) and are forever being ordered to our feet. We are, of course, forbidden to smoke. There is no drinking, no men further in than the front hallway or lounge, and a strict curfew after college dances and the pictures: fifteen minutes after the last waltz to walk briskly home from the Saturday dance in the gymnasium, and just seven to come back from the pictures. We have to almost run to keep to this, but I know of no-one who protests, and certainly no-one is sent home pregnant. This doesn’t stop couples bidding a tender farewell, clutching one another in the shadows by the statues, nor does it stop the statues’ breasts being painted bright blue with a blue bag on festive occasions. Eventually their marble breasts and nipples are covered by two cypresses, planted to screen them as quickly as possible.

  Perhaps I should pause here and explain our prevailing state of innocence. First of all we don’t have the words to convey sexual organs or sexual activity. We would never use a simple three-letter word like SEX to describe something of such great mystery that it can’t be named or even imagined. If a thing is not named, it can’t exist in the mind, and can only exist in the body as a yearning or lack of something-or-other. Nevertheless we spend a lot of time trying to cultivate what we call sex appeal. Those who have it are comfortable and self-assured in their bodies, but many of us, full of false modesty, are ashamed and self-conscious. Boys who take liberties — a hand sneaking around under the armpit towards the breast, or a too deep kiss — are quickly labelled wolves; they have wandering hands and word soon goes around. The opposite are called drips. These are the boys who can’t stammer out an invitation to the pictures or get up and dance without embarrassment, and whose hands sweat with terror when they do manage to lead us onto the dance floor. Between the two, wolves and drips, we seek the ideal. We guard our virtue with our lives, for girls are divided strictly into those who do and those who don’t, and nobody respects the girls who do. Nobody will marry them, and in particular the boys they do it with will never marry them. No woman teacher in a country town could possibly be one of those who do. So we are in every way, never mind Miss Roulston, our own chaperones. Virgins we come and virgins we depart.

  I am doubly protected. I am going with a cadet journalist on the Grafton Daily Examiner whom I’ve met on one of my holidays at home. He’s seventeen and we have promised to be true to one another, which means never going out with anyone else, or even holding hands with another. This discipline is practised for over a year, interspersed with time at home sitting hand-in-hand on the autumn-toned lounge by day, and by night locked together under the jacaranda tree, kissing and hugging, yearning for something more. My father casts a baleful glance on this young man, but doesn’t say, this time, that he is like dog’s vomit or something the cat dragged in. The affair peters out when I return to Grafton having remained true, to find that he is leaving for a new job in Sydney and, not only that, while I’ve been true to him he’s been taking out another girl, one who not only has sex appeal but wears red high-heeled shoes.

  Our lecturers are benign and helpful. In a biology exam we are required to draw and label a segment of a tapeworm, interesting in that it’s a hermaphrodite — that is it has both sexes in one. I don’t know how we’re going to explain this to the schoolchildren of New South Wales. Carried away, I label the testes of the tapeworm as testicles but the lecturer, nicknamed Tommy Wog, doesn’t even blink as he hands the paper back. The geography lecturer doesn’t blink either when her panties fall down during her lecture. All elastic is weak during the war and there are experiments with all sorts of plants, poinsettias for instance, to find a substitute for Malayan latex, now unavailable to us. She simply scoops them up onto the lectern before her, and gets on with the lesson. I stand behind the music lecturer, Cam Howard, in church the Sunday after we arrive and, forgetting that I’m tone-deaf, join in the singing. A few quiet words after the service and my voice is silenced forever. His aversion is girls who knit in his lectures. I knit a whole dress of cornflower blue (three-ply, Bluebell crepe, intricate pattern) hiding adroitly behind a portly girl at the back. This knitted dress is my only musical accomplishment at college. I hate it as soon as it’s finished and wear it only twice.

  Our training is unashamedly vocational, with only enough theory to be familiar with such concepts as motivation and positive reinforcement. We have a smattering of pop psychology and talk with authority about sexual repression (which we find diverting) and introverted and extroverted personalities. We study sociology, geography, enough biology to teach nature study, and lots of enjoyable literature, music and art. Speech is considered as important as deportment and virtue. The ideal is known as Standard Southern English, the mellifluous diction of the ABC, and we have regular speech training sessions to eradicate those supposed Australian failings — slovenly vowels and nasal diction. These ideals persist until the early seventies when I’m teaching at a high school and the English master, whose chief distinction is to have played the lead in A Man for All Seasons with the local theatre group, the Pelican Players, suggests that I should take elocution lessons to remove my Australian accent!

  Our training is based on observation and practice. Each week we observe model lessons at the demonstration school. Despite the saccharine speech of some of the infants’ teachers who address the children as little people, and the self-consciousness of children so used to being observed, we learn much. We also have six stints of practice teaching during our two years
’ training. My first practice is at West Armidale, a school dreaded by all because of the rough manners of the children who gather at the gate to chant stewed ants! stewed ants! as we make our trembling way through. We are closely observed most of the time but best of all are the times when we are left alone with the class and can make our own mistakes unobserved.

  It’s useless to imagine that while I’m enjoying myself so much things will go well at home, and one part of me is always alert to the drama being played out there. The first crisis is when my mother has a gruesome operation for an ectopic pregnancy, her second during these years and life-threatening, especially in a small country hospital. She haemorrhages badly and needs an urgent blood transfusion. There is no blood bank and my father’s blood is incompatible. Rushing out of the hospital to find a blood donor in a hurry, he meets one of the local ministers in the hospital corridor, no doubt there to comfort the sick. The minister, a large and burly man with the plumped-out features of someone who enjoys his food and has plenty of it, astonishes my father by refusing point blank to give blood. His ministry, he says, is far too important for him to be weakened by its loss. The meatworkers pass the hat around for the medical expenses and one of them, not afraid of being weakened, acts as a donor.

  She is barely recovered from this when she leaves home in response to some of my father’s more intolerable behaviour. She intends to get a job in Sydney and is sad and bitter. When I get my father’s letter I break down completely; it seems that I’ve only been kidding myself that I’m out of the family morass. I cry torrents to the astonishment of my two room-mates, who are much saner than I am. Then I sit up in bed and write a sodden letter begging them to get back together again. I feel guilty, then and always, for every happy moment that I spend away from them. My father also writes, begging her to come home. The pressure on her from all sides to do what she probably wants to do anyway is too much and she returns. They patch it up and so ensure another fifteen years of misery.

  It is 1945 and the war is coming to an end. The big war map of Europe at the college shows the D-Day landings, the advance towards the Rhine, the Battle of the Bulge and the final victory in Europe, but we are still intent on the war in the islands to the north. The map of the Pacific, showing the final battles for New Guinea, New Britain and Borneo, the Philippines and Iwo Jima, is updated and explained to us almost daily. Then suddenly we are stopped in our tracks by the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the abrupt ending to the war. We realise with astonishment that a new power has entered the world; that nature itself has been harnessed, not only to incinerate people and cities in one blinding flash, but to alter the genetic basis of life itself. A tidal wave of joy sweeps through the country. The days when the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki are among the happiest of the war, and I can’t be hypocritical about this. The relief is indescribable. There has been so much cruelty, so much suffering, that we don’t give a thought to the unimaginable casualties among Japanese civilians, but turn our minds immediately to the post-war world. We are selfish and see things only in relation to ourselves. We imagine that with victory and peace all problems will disappear. The men will all come home; we will no longer go to dances where the only partners are seventeen-year-old beardless boys or ancient dodderers; we will meet all those soldiers and airmen we have been sending love and kisses to, we will find romance.

  This coincides with the end of our training. We have our final examinations, go to our graduation ball decked out like debutantes in white organdie and tulle, have our portraits taken at Solomon’s Studios in Beardy Street and pack to leave. Our results are sent direct to our fathers for, according to the principal, our fathers still own us, and hence they own our results. At our final assembly he announces that those like myself who are just eighteen are being sent to our homes and the protection of our families because of the danger posed by thousands of women-hungry ex-servicemen being demobilised. So I am to go to Grafton where there will be a great surge of women-hungry men returning, while my older friends are sent to places like Trundle and Comboyne where they’ll see scarcely one. We have a stirring final lecture where we are reminded of our high purpose. We must, according to the principal, cherish hopes and see visions and, most important of all, must face the moral imperative in all its awful majesty (his words). We won’t be wearing any red dresses after that! The principal also issues a special warning to his girls, for he’s protective to the end. We mustn’t marry the first farmer who asks us for, according to him, they’re only looking for someone to milk the cows. I’ll spurn his advice and marry a farmer, but I never learn to milk a cow.

  The local inspector of schools comes to one of my final lessons at Ben Venue School and offers me an appointment at Armidale the following year, in one of the schools where students are sent to practise. This would reverse the principal’s decision that I go home to the protection of my family and would really set me up in my career. I would also be able to do that university degree which by now I’ve begun to covet. However, worried and guilty about the situation at home, I ring my mother and ask her what she would like me to do. As we have no phone, I have to ring the Glenreagh Timber Mill yards across the road in South Grafton and wait until she is summoned to the phone. She doesn’t hesitate. Just come home! she says in the flat and defeated tones that I’m so familiar with. And I do. Of all the silly decisions I’ve made in my life this is probably the worst.

  The dance

  Most girls at this time have only a short period between leaving school and becoming engaged and married. Marriage is their only ambition and all their lives they have been preparing for this glorious event. I am now one of them but my situation is slightly different. Engrossed in study, I’ve not prepared a glory box full of sheets and pillowcases, embroidered supper cloths, doilies and the like and, because I have a career, my progression towards marriage will not be so automatic. I suppose I’m at a stage halfway between the old world and the new. I’ll dance in the light, but always against the background of work and career.

  I am now in charge of third class at Grafton Primary School. I teach sixty-three small girls of an amazing similarity, for in the forties and fifties conformity is all. Uniforms are neatly pressed, hair is plaited and trussed up with butterfly bows and bouquets of flowers are brought to the teacher each Monday morning. Stars for good work form constellations in their books, and the backs of their hands are purple with merit stamps which they try not to wash off. I am only ten years older than they are and haven’t yet the wit to know that this perfection is mostly surface gloss. Their children, the next generation, will scorn their values and chase after strange gods and substances. The Age of Aquarius is just over the horizon, somewhere up near Nimbin. Meanwhile, wrapped up in my own performance as Teacher, it’s a long time before I learn to watch out for and value the misfits; they’ll make their mark later, one way or another.

  Those who are in trouble stand out clearly and there’s little can be done for them. There is, for instance, a boy I teach later in a mixed class. He’s bullet-headed, with a face like a fish, but madly brilliant; his intelligence level can’t be measured. Yet he’s way, way down in a pit of despair, curled up in his own oubliette, deliberately out of contact. He walks greyhounds each morning and afternoon, trudging behind them for hours like a surly little pony, and is beaten by his father for the slightest mistake. He sits up the back and bangs his head on the desk, relentlessly and savagely for most of the day. Another small girl with red hair and a putty-coloured face compulsively steals bicycles to attract attention; her father has deserted the family and her mother works long hours in a Prince Street cafe. Every time a girl’s bicycle is reported missing the police sergeant retrieves it from her home, then enjoys a milkshake at the cafe while shaking a stern finger at the mother, for he understands that she can’t do any better with her children than she’s already doing. Twelve years later, when I’m waiting in the local maternity hospital for the birth of my third child, this r
ed-headed girl is brought in in the last stages of labour. Her boyfriend has ferried her in from a bush settlement, thirty miles out on a bumpy track, on the pillion of his Harley Davidson. She’s quite shaken up when she arrives.

  Another girl’s intelligence is so low she’s classified as a moron; people are not afraid at this time to put such labels on children. She comes in from the bush each day in the same stained clothes. She can’t write her own name, and has nits and boils (a serial infection, I count forty-three when I clean and dress them each morning before school). She’s the only child left in her family and has an insistent story of a new baby, not the first she says, who goes quiet and dies in her cot at home. After weeks of working on it I train her to write her name on the blackboard. Then I discover that we’ve spelled it wrongly; her parents have invented their own bizarre version. I never learn the names of the dead babies, or if they lived long enough to have a name. There is no means, at this time, of reporting suspected abuse, for it’s considered that parents own their children and no-one else should interfere. So the teachers just have to do what little they can to help, to divert from the head-banging, to treat the lice and boils, perhaps to round up a few clothes.

  The girls school is housed in venerable old buildings from the last century, shaded by massive plane trees which drop their fluff each autumn and give teachers and children acute hay fever. The building is gothic, with arched windows, thresholds worn down by the steps of generations of children, and doors, skirtings and teachers’ desks of magnificent red cedar. Mine is one of the oldest rooms, rather like a chapel, and the smell as I enter is the smell of all old schoolrooms; of chalk dust, ink powder, sweating leather school bags and shoes, perspiring children. The compensation is the light which floods the western windows, filtering like a benediction through the lime-green leaves of the plane trees. The velvety pattern of grey, green and lemon on their trunks holds me mesmerised, for I too, as well as the children, daydream through the hot and dusty afternoons.