Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  My sixty-three eight-year-olds are undergoing an awesome rite of passage, learning to write with ink, a nerve-racking experience. The ink monitors mix their brew from ink powder and fill each inkwell, at the same time inking themselves like savages. Wooden pen holders are distributed together with new nibs which have to be sucked to remove their coating, otherwise they won’t hold the ink. No-one that I know of ever swallows one, but it’s a worry. Then comes the big adventure of dipping into the inkwell and copying the careful writing on the blackboard. Wrecked nibs, blotted pages, inked fingers and mouths are the rule. I teach this large class for some months until another teacher arrives and the class is reduced to forty-five, a usual figure at this time. Anyone with a class under forty children is envied.

  The school is divided into infants, boys and girls sections and the teachers are attributed by gender — men teach the boys and women teach the infants and girls. The hierarchy is absolute; the headmaster of the boys section is senior to the headmistress of the girls section, and also lords it over the headmistress of the infants section. Just as well for, after teaching little people (as she calls them) for more than forty years, she has become childish herself. She rewards teachers, cleaners and children alike with merit stamps on the back of the hand. I start on a salary of two pounds, seven shillings and sixpence, just five shillings more than my salary two years earlier in the Tick Board Office. However within months of the end of the war the Teachers Federation, which we joined as a matter of course at the college, mounts a campaign for a professional wage and professional status. They are denounced as raving Communists out to destroy the country, but within months they win their case and my salary jumps to more than five pounds, almost as much as my father’s. We also achieve, for the first time, professional status, with a Teachers Certificate after three years’ service.

  During this time I meet Olga Masters, the wife of one of the teachers in the boys school and the mother of four young children, and more to come. Many people see her husband as a victim, kept poor by so many urgent little mouths, but Olga knows what she wants. Her home is clamorous with children, their wet and drying clothes are draped everywhere and the pungent smell of baby’s pee hangs over everything. The children possess the home and she possesses them. Later she becomes a journalist on the Lismore Northern Star, then the Manly Daily, then a playwright for radio and television and eventually, in her sixties, a successful writer of short stories and novels, all of them providing a stark commentary on the lives of Australian women and children, especially in country towns like Grafton. Not only that, her children are successful: one becomes a leading sporting figure, another an investigative journalist, and yet another a television producer.

  This distant world with its rituals and conventions would be unbelievable to modern schoolchildren. It’s a world of special days and festivals: on Anzac Day the girls dress up as Red Cross nurses and march in the procession with the returned soldiers; on Remembrance Day they stand for a minute’s silence for the dead of the Great War; and on Wattle Day — the first day of August — they recite:

  The bush was grey, a week today,

  Olive-green and gold and grey

  But now the Spring is here to stay

  With blossom for the wattle!

  This is written in copperplate on the blackboard and, like most of their lessons, festooned with chalk drawings, in this case of fluffy wattle blossom and wattle fairies. On Arbor Day we plant yet another tree in the playground, on Gould League of Bird Lovers’ Day we draw various Australian birds and swear to be nice to them, on Far West Children’s Day we collect money for holidays by the sea for sick children from the west of the state. All these celebrations proceed unvarying, as if ordained by God, and the most spectacular of all is the Jacaranda Festival. Together with another teacher I am detailed to train the maypole dancers for the festival.

  The Jacaranda Festival can only be described as a communal madness. Everything is coloured purple for a week, including sandwiches and ice-cream. Tons of purple crepe paper are trucked in to decorate everything — shops, street lights, bicycles and people — with paper blossoms and ruffles. Crepe-paper jacaranda blossoms, brighter than the real thing, fill the air by day and bright dreams drift into the air by night. Perhaps true love will come in festival mood — all is longing and anticipation. There are processions by night and the Jacaranda Queen rides high, her diadem bright against the starry October sky, her diamonds glittering against her purple robes of office. She is for all the world like the Virgin in an Easter procession and the little children look up in wonder and adoration. It’s in this atmosphere that the massed schools display takes place and the maypoles are the glittering centrepiece of this most glittering occasion. There are eight of them with sixteen dancers for each, and these are set up in the playground, under the dappled umbrella of the big plane trees, months beforehand. We teach the original intricate steps and these are practised intensively until they are imprinted forever in the childish psyches, no doubt performed over and over again in their fevered jacaranda dreams.

  Who can explain the obsession with the maypole in colonial Australia, especially, of all places, on the humid North Coast? Pictures taken at the turn of the century show maypole dancing at an Orange Lodge commemoration at Clunes, at an Empire Day picnic at Jiggi, in the Lismore showground and, much later, at every Jacaranda Festival since its commencement. Since antiquity the maypole has been a fertility dance performed on May Day to celebrate the creative energy of nature and the spring. The focus is upon the central pole, the symbol of potency, and the dancers caress and embrace it with their ribbons, weaving a pattern to enclose and adorn it.

  The Puritans knew a thing or two when they banned the maypole. Thomas Hardy also knew the true significance of the dance. This is why Tess, the innocent village maiden in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is dancing in the May Day celebrations when Angel Clare first catches sight of her and commences the tragic movement that leads to her pregnancy and death. The maypole has everything to do with sex and fertility. New Age cults in Oregon have revived the dance and see it as central to their fertility rituals. In the colony this potent meaning has been hidden, submerged in its social function as a nostalgic reminder of England, or what colonials imagine England to have been like. In Grafton in 1946, though few would be aware of its meaning as a fertility ritual, still the dance goes on to celebrate the spring and the blooming of the jacarandas.

  When the great day comes there is a hush of expectation as the eight maypoles, each painted a brilliant white, are carried like inverted crucifixes onto the showground. Their contrasting satin ribbons — red and white, red and green, purple and green — have been specially chosen to display the patterns which will sheathe the maypole. The piano plays a brisk polka with words that are more than appropriate:

  My mother said that

  I never should

  play with the gypsies in the wood

  If I do

  she will say

  naughty girl to run away!

  Each maypole is like a roundabout and the dancers skip round them and around, like little merry-go-round ponies, weaving in and out and passing one another on the left and then the right, tensing their ribbons then loosening them, weaving the pattern down the pole then, at a signal, reversing direction until the pattern is undone and a new figure begun. The children revel in their mastery of the dance and their faces shine with joy. Invariably some clumsy child drops a ribbon and that particular maypole stumbles to a halt. Then small faces contort with fury and small tongues hiss at the one who has broken the pattern. A teacher runs onto the field to sort out the tangle and send them into the next figure. All too soon the show and the applause is over, the maypoles are carried off, the shadows lengthen and the showground is vacant except for a few paper streamers, purple of course, blowing in the wind.

  In many ways the maypole is a metaphor for the dance of courtship and marriage in which their older sisters are engaged. The figures of th
is other dance are as carefully rehearsed, as traditional and unchanging. It too has an oblique, a hidden meaning, for it is in truth a fertility dance. Witness the circling around the central flame, the practised repetition of significant steps and patterns, the triumphant apotheosis in the marriage ceremony, then the dimming of the lights and the deserted showground. Just don’t drop the ribbon.

  The flame

  How do young people meet one another at this time? The only entertainments are the pictures and the dances; on almost every night of the week there is dancing somewhere, in either of the two dance halls in Grafton, in the School of Arts at South Grafton, or in one of the country halls. The dances cater for a certain section of the community. Methodists have a horror of dancing; it’s said they won’t make love standing up in case someone sees them and thinks they’re dancing. Baptists wouldn’t dream of dancing but Anglicans and Presbyterians do, while Catholics often hold their own dances. They keep it, as it were, in the family. The sons and daughters of the professional classes don’t go to public dances, for there they might meet and form an attachment with someone unsuitable. Married couples don’t usually go to dances; what would be the point? Dances are marriage marts. All the good fun people do go and the dances are well run and highly respectable, at least inside the hall.

  The Criterion dance hall is my favourite, and is as much a reminder of old-time Grafton as the photographer’s shop in Fitzroy Street or the Marble Bar cafe. The Criterion dates back to the turn of the century, to the time when girls put up their hair at sixteen and waltzed in decorous long skirts, and the decor is of that era — overblown Victorian. The benches around the sides are padded with floral cretonne that reaches to the floor. From the ceiling hang beaded lampshades, as if in a boudoir, festooned with extravagant deep pink crepe-paper roses. The honey-coloured dance-floor is waxed to a suicidal finish and above it, on a balcony, the orchestra plays. The pianist and the drummer are young women, two sisters, attended always by their mother, there to keep the men away. They don’t dance or mix with the rest of us, for theirs is a higher calling.

  There are unwritten rules at the Criterion, as at other dance halls of the time. Girls sit on the cretonne benches inside while the men and boys gather on the footpath outside and in the vestibule, waiting for the music to strike up. The Master of Ceremonies and the doormen are in shirtsleeves and waistcoats with black bow ties. There are no bouncers; it would never, ever be necessary here. There is officially no drinking but a bottle of port wine, known as Red Ned, can be hidden in the roots or branches of the camphor laurel trees outside and sampled between dances. There are no connoisseurs here, all wine is plonk, valued for alcohol level alone. These are the days of six o’clock closing and drinking in a public place is strictly illegal. The police sergeant prowls around sniffing out footpath drinkers, and there is many a good-humoured chase through backyards and over fences to elude him with the precious bottle.

  A flourish from the saxophonist summons all to the dance floor and there is a rush of men crossing and crisscrossing the floor to invite a girl to dance. Girls sit expectantly on the benches along the walls, waiting in an agony of anxiety, but trying to hide it. The most popular are chosen first and there are always one or two conspicuous wallflowers. These attempt nonchalance as they stroll towards the dressing room and hide there, freshening up their lipstick for the next game of chance or choice. On either side of the far end of the hall are baroque mirrors, six feet high and oval in shape, their frames heavily embossed with gilt. The dancers approach them self-consciously, for they need to check on the swing of the skirt, whether the petticoat is hanging or not, and whether they are dancing with flair and panache. The most intricate and baroque steps are always performed in front of the mirrors.

  Hearts lift and swing with the music, with the joy of sweeping onto the waxed floor in the arms of one of the many expert dancers there, of dancing towards one of the oval mirrors and performing a series of intricate steps in front of it. I prefer old-time dances that show off my circular skirts: the Viennese Waltz, the Pride of Erin, the Schottische and the barn-dance. Many of the dresses, and this often includes my own, have been made in the latest style that very afternoon, the stitches still hot. We are still wearing our Scarlett O’Hara hairdos, swept up at the sides and front with long hair at the back; an army of small-town Scarletts all circling the flame, circling and circling the dance floor at the Criterion hall.

  These rituals are not varied even for the wave of returning servicemen. No matter what their experience in the souks of Alexandria or Beirut, they must now conform to customs as ritualised as those of the lyrebird or the peacock. An invitation to save the last dance (always a medley) means that the man will walk the girl home, or perhaps take her home on the last bus. Missing the last bus and walking home in the moonlight over the decking of the Grafton bridge is a dangerous practice, likely to be met by a pyjama-clad and furious father who’s been biting his fingernails all night. A discreet goodnight kiss is allowed, but never the first time. I wrestle with a young farmer from Ulmarra who is just home from the war and, I hear later, has vowed to take out every new teacher in town. We are sitting on a park bench in the moonlight gazing at the river in front of the Crown Hotel. He’s a bit dim and just doesn’t understand when I explain, patiently, that if I let him kiss me on this first occasion he won’t respect me.

  I could have sought a mate in a number of other places, for instance at the socials run by the church youth group, the Fellowship, where young people sing around the piano and play games like Musical Chairs and Postman’s Knock, a prim kissing game in which the tongue is firmly restrained. Fellowship socials are not run to bring the young to God, but to ensure that they marry within their own religion. Another source could have been the many young teachers just back from the war, but I don’t know anyone who has met a lover at a Teachers Federation meeting. What chemistry determines the choice of a partner? The choices are often arbitrary, perhaps the glimpse of a profile that resembles a screen hero, perhaps the jaunty set of a hat brim, a kind word where none was expected, or a wicked sense of humour; small basis for a lifelong contract. Most choices, including mine, are made for the wrong reasons and it’s sheer good luck if they turn out well. But, like my father, I always was lucky.

  These are the joyful yet heartbreaking epiphanies of life: the falling in love, the breaking of the bread of life, the immersion into its eternal cycles, the birth of a child. Beside these experiences little else in life matters. Some people fall in love many times, for me it’s once only. I’m sitting on one of the tables in the supper room at the South Grafton School of Arts, idly swinging my legs in the interval between dances, when a stranger walks in from the outside and into my life forever. He is tall with dark red hair and distinctive green eyes, too thin from years of chronic malaria but still carrying himself with a certain swagger, and my time of free choice is over, just like that. It’s difficult to find a suitable metaphor but, given my family history, a lightning strike will do. The symptoms are easily recognised. The legs turn to water and a sudden encounter, around the bank corner in Prince Street for instance, can bring on a dangerous spasm — the heart flips right over.

  What is love? One of Shakespeare’s characters says that it’s simply a lust of the blood and a permission of the will, in short nothing but a wild hormonal urge. Psychologists, on the other hand, would say that I was simply seeking a father figure, falling so suddenly for a man almost ten years older than myself. This ignores the most important factor of all, the allure of the great world beyond my knowledge. Many years later when I study Othello I instantly see a parallel. Othello is also just back from the big wars and must explain to the Venetians why Desdemona has fallen so passionately in love with him. She loved me, he says, for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. The glamour of the outsider, the soldier who has been to faraway places, has seen and done dreadful deeds of war and returns to tell of them, is almost impossible to resist.

/>   This is a very attractive man; he will always be so. He’s profoundly and obviously kind. Children will seek him out in a roomful of adults, stray dogs will follow him home and women too if I don’t watch it. I soon realise that this is the same soldier who ate my cake so long ago, and didn’t follow up his correspondence with a fourteen-year-old. Destiny, it seems, has preserved him for me during those four long years in the desert and the jungle, in and out of military hospitals and, no doubt, the arms of others. Like most Australians he’s a great spinner of yarns and he’s brought plenty back with him. Both the first and the second AIF, we know, were dedicated tourists and gatherers of souvenirs. They savoured all things strange and foreign and carried home (some say stole) as much as possible. He brings home few souvenirs, notably an intricate and lovely moonstone necklace from Colombo for his mother (stolen from our daughter in Canberra thirty years later), and memories and stories which can’t be stolen.

  There are stories of the Holy Sepulchre, the Wailing Wall and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; the estaminets in Beirut in which the girls sold exotic liqueurs and sometimes themselves; the snow-clad valleys high in the Syrian mountains where he was shot at by the mysterious Jebel Druse; of visits to the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, to the tea plantations in the highlands of Ceylon, of larrikin escapades in Colombo and the long and dangerous voyage home through the Indian Ocean on a Dutch ship with no escort, outrunning the Japanese submarines. But there are no stories about New Guinea. These have been blacked out, only to return in nightmares. I don’t notice for many years that these glamorous stories are like polished travelogues. They are a façade, something to hide behind. There are depths below, blackness upon blackness, that can’t be spoken of and mustn’t be allowed up into the light of day.