Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  This has all the elements of a disaster — an older and experienced man, a gullible and romantic eighteen-year-old — and my father is appalled. But he too is won over by the stories; for one reason or another he missed the war and now relives it vicariously. Others warn me against him: my Granny because he is not of pure British blood as we are (one of his grandfathers was Swedish); the older teachers because he is too experienced. They remind me that he has been dancing in Princes and Romanos, sophisticated nightclubs in Sydney, and surely won’t be interested in me for long. But they are all wrong and by the end of the year it’s certain that we’ll be married, although my father insists that we wait until I’m twenty (he can refuse his permission until I’m twenty-one). So we wait, not easily, and learn more, much more about each other.

  How much of a person can one learn from their dreams, memories, visions and desires? We talk and talk. We walk alone yet together, the starry sky reflected in the river as we sit on the bank or wander by its side. We get to know one another in a way that no-one else has ever known either of us.

  He tells me about his mother, a daughter of the great river, who swam and rowed a boat almost before she could walk. She is descended from those highlanders who settled around Maclean in 1852, estranged from everyone but their compatriots by their weird Gaelic tongue and their forbidding religion. Her elder brother was killed on the Somme in the big battles in 1918 and her whole family was still in shock when she married his best friend, just back from the war.

  His father was also a casualty of the Great War. He’d been hit in the face by a burst of shrapnel but his inner wounds, those that were hidden, were much more painful. He was also mourning two brothers, both younger than himself and brought up with him in an orphanage. They are both dead in France; one missing at Pozières, one choking on German gas at Péronne just days before the AIF was withdrawn from the war. Together his mother and father cleared a soldier-settler block on Turkey Island in the Clarence River and tried to establish a family of their own. This story, of the three uncles dead in France and the disfigured face of the father, is almost too much to bear.

  He was born at the end of 1918, an armistice baby in more ways than one. He and the brothers who followed him were supposed to replace their dead uncles and, one by one, were given the same names. He was named Leslie Francis Walker, after the nineteen-year-old uncle killed at Pozières. He was supposed to bring comfort and peace to his father but how could that ever be possible?

  He tells me of his birth; how his father rowed his eighteen-year-old mother ten miles up the Clarence River to Maclean to the home of the midwife. He tells me too of another time some months later when, rowing home alone from Maclean to Turkey Island, her baby laid carefully in the bow of the boat, she lost an oar and was swept away, heading for the mouth of the Clarence on the rip-tide. Struggling with the one oar she wrestled the boat across the tide to the breakwater, climbed out, wrapped the baby in her skirt and sat there alone and wet until dawn. A group of fishermen paused in wonder at the sight of a mother and baby on the cold and deserted breakwater just above the high tide mark. She was only nineteen at this time and thought nothing of it.

  He tells me of a vision — not a dream but a vision, he insists on that — when he was too small to talk or tell of it. He was lying wide-eyed at dawn between his sleeping parents when a luminous sphere swam through the window and circled leisurely in the air above the bed. He gazed intently at its radiant glow and the strange hieroglyphics and shadings which covered its surface. Could a child of two have a vision, remember it and tell of it later? This one could.

  He walked in the school door for the first time five years later and saw the globe on the teacher’s desk. With a shock he realised what his vision was. The world had come to him, visited him at two years old in a crumpled bed in a raw timber house on a soldier-settlement block on Turkey Island. The world had come to him! His sphere was a luminous world swimming in its own firmament. Its hieroglyphics were the continents, oceans, archipelagos, rivers, deserts, mountain ranges of the world. What did this mean? Is he to be a world traveller, a voyager on the face of the earth?

  He tells me of his love for the land his family now farms, flood land on a peninsula in the river; of the big timber house sheltered by a magnolia tree as old as the settlement of the Big River; of hurrying home from school as young as ten to plough behind two horses — proud of his straight furrows and of the flocks of birds who followed his plough, eager for the pickings. He tells me of his longing to fly and of every penny saved as a boy for flying lessons until he won his flying licence just before the war. He has dreamed of this farm and his flying for five long years.

  And yet a recurrent and terrifying dream has to do with flying. He is flying over the land like a bird, his body unprotected, vulnerable. He passes high over fertile valleys, deserts and mountain ranges while a pack of howling wolves pursues him, overtaking him on each mountain peak, slavering and howling with rage, leaping in the air, tearing at his unprotected belly, then falling away and racing towards the next mountain top. What can this mean?

  I learn too of the moonlit night in New Guinea when a stray Japanese soldier cut a slit in his mosquito net with a razor-sharp bayonet and peered in. They looked deep into one another’s eyes for a long minute then the enemy melted away into the jungle. Was this figure, the Japanese soldier, real?

  I learn of a failure of love when, sick and disoriented in a military hospital, he wrote a brief note to the girl he was about to marry calling off the wedding. His father disowned him and family bitterness followed him all the way to New Guinea and still hangs in the air. He’s determined that, this time, things will be different.

  He tells me of his longing for an enduring love, one that has gone to church and been blessed before all the people, a perpetual love, one that wakens each morning in the same bed with the same person, lover and friend as well.

  I listen and learn of this and much, much more …

  My main problem is that empty glory box, a scandal to my Granny and aunts with their traditional ways. Unbleached calico (no coupons) is made into sheets and hung on the line in rain and sun for weeks to bleach. Towels (khaki and white stripes) are bought from wartime disposals (no coupons) and lingerie is made from a pure silk panel from a parachute. Imagine a trousseau (as it is called) made from pure silk trimmed with old cream lace found under the counter of the general store at Chatsworth Island, where it has probably lain unnoticed since the turn of the century. We are used to making-do. During the war years overcoats have been made from grey army blankets, skirts from men’s trousers, and woollen jumpers have been unpicked and knitted up to different patterns over and over again. Since I was sixteen I have been making all my own clothes, even tailored suits and ball gowns, but the wedding dress is to be different. It will be made by a dressmaker, a copy in magnolia satin of an illustration from the Australian Women’s Weekly (where else?). It has thirty-six tiny covered buttons down the back, each enclosed in its own loop. When the wedding is over and I am changing to go away, and everyone else is busy, my father volunteers to unhook all these buttons, his blunt fingers clumsily fumbling with them one by one. He has tears in his eyes and I have too; it’s one of our few tender moment in twenty years.

  We girls are all hopelessly ignorant, despite the instruction manuals for brides which are passed around. My aunts have spoken to me of the experience of their generation, of the mixture of terror and inevitability with which they approached their wedding night, knowing the facts from their observation of farm animals, but appalled at the very idea that such gross acts could ever apply to their own tender flesh. For them there was no alternative: marriage and endless childbearing or a long and stringy maidenhood helping out with other people’s children. It is not much different for my generation: one girlfriend is shocked to learn, at eighteen, that married people have sex for fun, not just to make a baby. Later a friend at Rita Island describes her wedding night when she sat outside in the dark on th
e verandah steps for hours, terrified of the unknown, before her husband coaxed her inside and into bed. I have no help from my mother. Unable to speak on this most delicate of subjects she behaves as if, on my honeymoon, I’m simply going away for a fortnight with a girlfriend. Meanwhile fear and curiosity are the keynotes of all the stories I hear, and fear is the price we pay for the prudery of our times.

  And yet for us it is completely different. We wake next morning in our first double bed in a hotel in Coffs Harbour; with a new vision we watch the sun rise over a sea which seems newly created. We too are transformed. All is changed, changed utterly; we are now complete, part of a whole rather than single individuals. We’ll torment each other as much as most married people do, but we’ll never again be alone. We go down to the jetty and each takes a photo of the other. These snapshots will be known to us, but to nobody else, as the morning after, our own private joke; but still our lives have changed forever.

  January 1950 finds us lying in the dark on two camp stretchers in a twelve-by-twelve tent. The tent is on an uncleared block on Rita Island in the delta of the Burdekin River in North Queensland. This is a soldier settlement block that we’ve been allocated in a ballot. We are to clear the land, plant sugarcane, wait until our crop grows, then reap a fortune. We’ve been married two and a half years and this is now our own land, our own farm in the making. All the land-hunger that we’ve inherited from our Irish ancestors is to be concentrated here. And this will be the first home that we will own, one that will recur in my dreams for the rest of my life as a place once owned, but in which, in one dream after another, I am now an intruder.

  Although our camp is on a rise it is at this moment almost swamped, for we are in the middle of the tropical wet. Only new chums like us would have come to this particular place in the wet season and pitched a tent. In the mantle of light shed each night by our Tilley lantern (for there will be no electricity for another five years), a dozen or more kangaroo rats gather to eat the beetles attracted by the light, and any scraps we care to throw. They are gentle and unafraid, unlike the hundreds of possums that squabble in the cocky-apple trees around us. There are whole families of these, from scabby old males with balls like dogs who grunt all night, to little joeys peeping from the pouch as their mothers climb from blossom to blossom, looking for honey. Possum-hunting at night, with a waddy to knock them to the ground and a couple of dogs to tear them to pieces, is a favourite pastime for the young males on the island. Meanwhile anything up to fifty gnarled and grotesque cane toads, repulsive as rats, sit on their haunches in the circle of light and feast on the insect life. Imported to eat the cane beetles that were destroying the cane crops, they’ve gone feral, breeding in their millions in the moist tropical nights. Their saliva poisons the chooks’ water and the chooks die. They spit in the eyes of cats and blind them. Ponds, streams and the very soil itself are tainted by these intruders from another world. They are everywhere, packed in tight clusters under every piece of wood, every scrap of bark.

  Our block is unfenced and the wild cattle gather in the smoke of our campfire, hoping, as we do, to escape the mosquitoes. The tropical night falls quickly here, and before we can climb into our camp beds we must wash the mud from our feet in a dish beside the bed then crawl in under the mosquito net and try to ignore the heavy breathing of the cattle. One is a massive red bull and he and several cows are scratching their backs on the wet tent-ropes just through the canvas. In the distance we can hear the booming of a solitary bull crocodile down alongside the anabranch of the Burdekin River, calling for a mate. In the main street of Ayr we see an eighteen-foot monster on display on the back of a truck. One has recently taken a child, a little girl of two or three, from the banks of the Burdekin much further upstream, dragged her into the water, submerged with her until she drowned then, before the horrified eyes of the bystanders, tossed her into the air like a rag doll again and again on its way downstream. Though seldom seen these are the creatures of nightmare. In them are embodied the most primitive and instinctive horrors, perhaps from our Jurassic past.

  Around our tent, pitched in its clearing, lie our 157 acres of future farm. It is broken country and will be hard to clear and hard to irrigate. There is open country with massive Morteon Bay gums, smaller cocky-apple trees in their thousands, and pandanus palms to remind us that we are now in the tropics. These open spaces are shoulder-high with coarse grass which flourished in the last wet season and has matured during the long dry. There are but two seasons here: the two or three months of torrential and often cyclonic rain, and the calm and temperate dry season during which the land recovers. The grass is alive with snakes and the carefully stitched nests of green ants hang from many a low limb, promising a fiery and throbbing few hours to anyone who brushes against them. These long-legged green ants are exquisite to look at but, like many things here, are poisonous.

  The block is intersected by dry watercourses that will fill as the wet season progresses. Along these are patches of jungle with Burdekin plum trees, tall palms, impenetrable undergrowth, and thick vines roping everything together. There could be anything in there, and there is, including tropical pythons, gold and black, sinuous and beautiful. The bulldozers will make short work of these places and their creatures. We are entranced with our new world. We fancy that we will be numbered among the first-footers, those who have taken to the virgin bush with axes, saws and now bulldozers in order to cultivate the wilderness. We are the most arrogant of new chums, but will learn quickly. We have to.

  The first two years of married life have not been easy. Despite my husband’s wide experience, he has no formal education, having left school (willingly it seems) just before the Intermediate Certificate to help his father dig a particularly heavy potato crop, so only unskilled jobs are open to him. Since the war he has been working for half-shares on his father’s farm, an arrangement which is common in the district. Indeed some sons who stay home on the farm are not paid a wage at all and, even when they have grown children of their own, still depend on the family patriarch for handouts, even for the weekly groceries. Our arrangement, that is half shares, is reasonable but won’t last, for the old man has an explosive temper. He can slip easily from nowhere into a volcanic rage, his trump card to order any offender, even his son, off his land instantly and forever. This happens several times.

  There is also the problem of where we are to live, for the housing shortage is desperate. Many young couples are building their own homes, even those who’ve never picked up a hammer before, and throughout the country people are on housing lists or living with relatives. Key money is demanded for flats and houses, and thousands of refugees are housed in sheds in migrant camps. We begin by renting a room with use of the kitchen, all that is available. Our landlady is a short, waddling woman with black hair which is crimped into iron waves at the hairdresser’s salon each week. It remains lacquered and undisturbed until the next appointment and, to make sure, is covered by a thick rayon net which comes halfway down her forehead. She is a compulsive housekeeper and insists that I peg each towel separately with four pegs along the top to keep the clothes line neat, and then iron everything, including the sheets. Moreover she talks incessantly, like a gramophone needle stuck in the one cacophonous groove. Nothing is too intimate to replay, including details of her marriage, her bowel habits and piles, and she expects confidences in return. The butcher, baker, greengrocer and every other caller retreat in dismay, often walking backwards as they are harangued with details of piles which are, she says, like bunches of grapes.

  She also cultivates groves of arum lilies, usually associated with funerals. No caller, even the doctor on his visits to inspect the much-discussed piles, escapes without an armload of funereal lilies. Her husband takes refuge in the shed where he waters the place he calls his garden, a sand-pit with a dozen bottles of beer buried up to their necks in wet sand, and only comes back into the house when he’s totally and benignly drunk. He hasn’t hinter-fered with me for hages, she s
ays with some pride. I am absolutely at her mercy and soon come to loathe the way the spittle sprays from her lips along with her patter. Soon, by some miracle, my father finds us a flat belonging to one of his mates from work. We acquire a bedroom suite in maple veneer, the latest fashion, a kitchen table and chairs, a bakelite wireless set, two lounge chairs and a cat which we are determined to call after the royal baby, the son of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Our flat is right alongside the railway line; Charlie the cat wanders onto the track one night and, dazzled by the brilliant white spotlight on the front of the train, is run over. Prince Charles’s luck, long-term, will be little better.

  Meanwhile our flat is a refuge for my husband’s unmarried brothers and sister, regularly ordered out of home by their father. Looking back from some distance I can understand that my father-in-law’s short fuse was the result of his past, a series of cruel strokes of fortune. His own father was Hjalmar Christian Leonard von Wolcker, an aristocratic Swedish immigrant who had been trained as an army officer at the Karlstad Military Academy in Sweden and had married an Irish girl from Clommel in Sydney in 1893. When they met he was working as a coachman at Leura, but he found work wherever he could, finally as a carrier operating from the Darling Harbour wharves and along Sussex Street. After ten years of marriage and a gradual attrition of his name to Harry Walker, his wife died of typhoid, leaving him unable to care for his three sons — my father-in-law, aged eight, and his younger brothers aged four and two. The three of them are taken to the orphanage at Kincumber on the Hawkesbury River run by the Sisters of St Joseph. Here the eight-year-old tries in vain to protect his younger brothers, especially the two-year-old, from the harsh treatment which was usual in orphanages at the turn of the century. He tells stories of the little boy crying for his mother and wetting the bed in the middle of the night then, as punishment, being wrapped in the wet sheet and made to stand out in the freezing cloisters until morning. They are all three barefoot, hungry and starved of affection. Their father makes the long trip by train then ferry to visit his children each Sunday, but has no idea of their week-day world.