Roundabout at Bangalow Page 19
All roads on Rita Island converge on a crossroads in the centre of the island. Here, sheltered by a giant weeping fig, is an abandoned butcher’s shop, a row of mailboxes, then the Rita Island hall and, across the road, the Rita Island school. This is a popular meeting place for the men to pick up the paper in the afternoon and yarn. The Courier Mail arrives four days late from Brisbane, and it isn’t an exciting paper even when it’s fresh off the press. The hall is of galvanised iron and, like many of the buildings, is built on stilts for coolness. Here occasional dances are held, quite unique in that they include musical items, but always the same songs, no matter what the occasion. One is a sentimental nineteenth-century drawing-room ballad about a lovely English rose, which begins with the line Dan Cupid has a garden. This is performed by a portly gentleman in a dark suit and accompanied by operatic gestures which would be more at home in Vienna than Rita Island. It’s the star turn and is applauded each time as if it’s brand new. It floats out incongruously over the moonlit cane fields, the mangrove swamps and down to the banks of the anabranch where the crocodiles thrash around and bellow into the night. No-one thinks this odd, nor the favourite dance which is a Scottish reel called Strip the Willow (for some time I think it’s Strip the Widow). I understand that this reel is regularly performed by the Queen and the Duke at Balmoral but it’s totally incongruous here, danced with flourishes by Spanish and Italian cane-cutters and truck drivers, spinning their partners till the floor rocks. It’s obviously a relic of the Scottish immigration in the nineteenth century.
Needing help to clear the block, LF hires a man from Wollongong who, with his wife, is renting a small weatherboard house nearby. I become friendly with her when my husband has an accident and she invites me to stay the night rather than sleep alone in the tent with the cattle just through the canvas. She confides to me that, in their many wrangles, her husband punishes her by dragging her out onto the lawn in front (it is mostly dirt and noogoora burrs) and rubbing her bare back in the bindi-eyes, not the common cats’ paws but the fiendish spiked ones called goats’ heads. A gentle girl with two young children, she has no hope of breaking away from this man. He’s been a powder monkey in the mines at Wollongong; now, when preparing the dynamite to blow up a stump, he always crimps the detonator onto the fuse with his teeth, risking spraying his brains onto himself and everyone else within reach. Indeed he’s sacked for this, after many warnings. It’s their son who later, after a fight in the playground at the Rita Island school, goes home for the twenty-two and threatens several of the pupils before he is disarmed by some passing cane-cutters. Children grow up fast here. A ten-year-old at this school takes his billy and tea with him and brews up a cuppa at playtime. Since babyhood he’s had his smoko and can’t survive without black tea.
Meanwhile we are establishing ourselves, assisted by the Queensland Agricultural Bank. We are given a living allowance of £5 a week for the eighteen months until we cut our first crop; everything else is a loan: £350 for a utility truck (second hand), £750 for the house, and appropriate amounts for tractor shed, tractor and basic implements, irrigation pump and the first year’s clearing. The sugar industry is bureaucratically controlled, down to the last stalk of cane, the last grain of sugar. Since the cane-cutters’ strikes of the thirties it has been heavily unionised. The bitter dispute at that time concerned the burning of cane before harvesting. The cutters insisted on burning to control Weil’s disease, spread by rats, and responsible for chronic ill health for some, and also for a number of deaths. The sugar barons and mills owners resisted this because burning caused a drop in the sugar content and hence their profits.
Kalamia Mill, to which we have been assigned, is owned by Australian Estates, a British company with huge pastoral interests in the Northern Territory, and train lines radiate out from it to cover the whole area it controls. During the eight months of the crushing, small shunting engines pull their string of cane trucks from every direction into the mill. Each cane farm in Queensland has an allocation of cane, an assignment which cannot be exceeded. The amount produced in the state is closely controlled as a glut of sugar could ruin the industry. The cane assignment is the most valuable part of our block; without it the land would be practically worthless. By the time we are set up we are in debt to the tune of about £5,000 while the tobacco growers up-river, who need drying barns and other more expensive extras, are in debt for up to £11,000; because of this, many of them will fail.
While it is still raining we begin to build the tractor shed of concrete blocks and move in with our maple veneer bedroom suite and table and chairs, all of which have come from the south, a new Canberra fuel stove and a Halstrom Silent Knight kerosene refrigerator, a temperamental brute that can smoke the place out in a few minutes if it’s not carefully tended. Then we begin the long wait for a carpenter to build our house. Two New Australians, Hungarians, move into the tent and I cook for all of us while they help my husband to clear the land. It’s been a condition of their acceptance into Australia that they must work for two years wherever the Manpower (the authority left over from the war) directs them.
They have escaped together, evading guards, dogs and searchlit barbed wire to make their way into Germany and thence to Australia. Ignace is a ferret-like little man with the tin teeth common to many refugees from Eastern Europe. He meets an Australian girl on a weekend trip to Magnetic Island, marries her, then leaves and so breaks his contract. He visits us years later with his wife and small children, his smile a gleaming testament to Australian dentistry. He is a successful business man, owning several dry-cleaning shops. Joe stays with us for years, sleeping in the tent and then the shed when we move into our own house, saving all his money and sending food and clothing back to his Mummy in Hungary (his mother as he claims, or his wife?). There is some mystery about these two; each calls the other a Nazi and they probably both were. Joe tells us nostalgic stories from the old country (Hungary) where, he says, he was a policeman. We are appalled one night when he’s been drinking and boasts of pushing Jews down holes in the frozen Danube and of burning the beards off Jehovah’s Witnesses with a blowtorch because they refuse to shave in prison. He chuckles all night at the memory. Can this be our gentle workman who is saving all his money to send home to Mummy? He lurches back to his shed where, the night before, a possum had fallen from the rafters straight into a drum of dirty sump oil then had run demented all over Joe’s bed, his mosquito net and all his clothes. Eventually Joe simply disappears, we don’t know where, but I doubt he would have been welcome back in Hungary.
On the block next to us is an ex-serviceman I’ll call Jack, originally from Babinda in North Queensland. He has been a Don-R or despatch rider in the army in the Middle East and then in Darwin. He has brought a wife and two little girls from the south with him. Sonia is a city girl, a former model with a taste for fine china and antiques but determined to make a success of life in the north. Jack builds a large shed on the banks of a lagoon. Its framework is of ti-tree logs which soon take root, grow and sprout luscious green shoots, giving the impression of living in a ti-tree arbour. Into these logs he drives a series of six-inch nails on which everything from saucepans to clothes is hung. Rough planks with cracks between them are nailed onto the logs and a flat galvanised iron roof nailed on top. It’s like an inferno in there in the summer, especially with the fuel stove burning. Here live the tractor, the wife and kids and the hired hand, a Pakistani farmworker called Dave. The western side of the shed is left open, supposedly so that Dave can turn to Mecca to pray at sunset. The situation suits Jack and he’s in no hurry to build a house. When the day’s work is done, he can sit on the bank of the lagoon in a deckchair and toss each empty Bundy Rum bottle into the lagoon, followed by the kerosene iron that won’t light, the chair that collapses, or anything else that riles him, for he’s a nasty drunk.
His wife has a hard time for the whole of the seven years they are there. One day some years later, when Sonia is almost due to have their fourth
child, the eldest, a girl of about five, comes running through the bush calling for help. Jack has had a sudden thirst and can’t start his car, a long low Customline with enormous fins, so he puts Sonia on the tractor to pull-start it, telling her that, as soon as the car revs up, she’s to put her foot down hard on the clutch. When the car starts, he unhooks the tow-rope and roars off, leaving her high above the road, perched on the steel seat of the tractor with her foot jammed on the clutch and her children crying on the dirt road below. She has no idea how to stop the tractor, or what will happen if she takes her foot off the clutch. This is not the first time she’s been left in the lurch and won’t be the last. Meanwhile he has a certain charisma that is hard to analyse; it’s a mixture of humour, bravado, and a rakish charm that appeals to men and women alike. He’s the most interesting of the soldier settlers and this, together with shared circumstances and a certain bonhomie, attracts my husband. They become drinking mates, something which causes me grief for years and doesn’t end until Jack commits an unforgivable crime. He shoots the family dog in front of his children (he’s drunk and it’s annoying him) and leaves it lying in its own blood until the following morning. This causes a rift between the two men which, thankfully, lasts until we leave.
Soon we build our house, settling on two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, with a bathroom between them and an open verandah as a living room. We intend to make this our home forever, so we build a small but quality house and expect to add to it later. There is much hilarity among the locals as the word spreads around that we’ve installed a plunge bath (uncommon in the north) inside the house. Many sightseers come to inspect and ask the question that is bothering everyone: Will it smell? The consensus is that we are now definitely getting above ourselves (they always suspected this). As one man says: The hose over the branch of the orange tree after dark was good enough for my mother, why not you?
Soon we give in to local custom and build an outside shower as well. Close to the house is the big windmill which pumps up the domestic water into a tank set high on a stand built of four logs. We nail hessian around the outside and install a water heater on the local model. A galvanised pipe fits like a sleeve around the water pipe and acts as a chimney. A shelf below it holds a tobacco tin full of kerosene with a rag wick. Once lit, the flame whoofs up the chimney like a shunting engine, heats the pipe and the water which runs through it, and lasts just long enough for a hot shower, if we ever need a hot shower. As the breeze from the Coral Sea blows and turns the windmill most of the day, dropping at dusk, the tank is always full to overflowing unless I have forgotten to turn off the sprinkler on the garden, in which case there’s a domestic crisis. LF has to climb the windmill and turn it by hand to get enough water for his shower. This is one of the few things that makes him lose his temper, and I don’t blame him.
Burdekin men
— Burdekin men wear blue singlets bleached to grey, tight khaki shorts, felt hats and mostly no boots.
— They carry cane-knives sharp enough to slice straight through a leg above the knee.
— They are accompanied by dogs known as Meathead or Hereboy.
— They call one another fond nicknames such as The Meatant or the Barra.
— They distrust the South. Sometimes one ventures as far South as Brisbane. One or two of the most adventurous go to the Melbourne Cup and marvel at the cold (in November).
— They know two seasons only, the crushen and the slack.
— For most of the year they plant cane, water cane, cut cane, cart cane to the siding, talk about cane and dream about cane. When one of their wives is selected for the Queensland hockey team they say that don’t grow no cane.
— One asks the cane inspector for advice on his wife’s pregnancy, for he sees a certain similarity between a woman and a cane-paddock. In each case it’s the yield that’s important. She speaks only Spanish so doesn’t understand the insult. The cane inspector circumnavigates her great belly as slowly and gravely as he would a patch of cane, scrutinises it front-on and side-on and predicts a boy. It’s a girl.
— Burdekin men like womanly women, those who know their place.
— Of sex they say wisely, ‘It’s gotta be fed and it don’t eat wheat’.
Burdekin women
— Burdekin women cook over hot fuel stoves; wash all the clothes in the copper outside in the burning sun; starch and iron the men’s shorts and shirts, worn when going to town to drink or bet; make all the family clothes.
— They sit in a car outside a pub with grizzling children for hours.
— They are grateful when their husband brings out an occasional shandy. They don’t drink straight beer. Women who drink straight beer have been known to get out of control.
— A Burdekin woman does not interrupt the men in the pub or the club, scream, fall frothing to the floor or beg her husband to come home soon or she’ll kill herself. As a spoiler of men’s pleasures she would shame her man forever.
— Burdekin women are sometimes taken to the new RSL club if it’s a social evening. Here they gather in a group discussing their children while the men carry on about what they did in the war, the snakes they have seen, the fish they have caught and the cane they are growing.
— They are womanly women. They pride themselves on this; they know their place.
— Of sex they say nothing, of childbirth plenty.
Redeem the time
I am marooned in a clearing surrounded by a sea of shoulder-high dry grass. The clearing is just off a dirt road on an island. I am marooned on an island in a river of sand or raging flood, take your pick. The river is in the far north of the state of Queensland, named in the last century after a fat German woman on the other side of the world. Clustered around me are the inanimate objects that bind me here: a weatherboard house sweltering in the heat, two rooms and a verandah, a tractor shed built of concrete blocks, an outside toilet a hundred yards away, a fuel copper and a set of laundry tubs under a tree and, towering over all, the windmill.
The windmill is the centre of this world. Without it the clearing would be dry dirt for most of the year. The span, a massive twelve feet, spins incessantly all day. The monotonous clink of the turning mill portions out the minutes, the hours, the days. My only meaning is in work.
I plant the runners of a certain tropical grass and water them with a sprinkler all day, every day. The lawn flourishes. It takes me five hours each weekend to cut it with a hand mower. All the floorboards are polished each week with dark tan boot polish, board by board, on my knees. I buy a pedal sewing machine and make all my husband’s shirts from a stout cloth called Caesarine. He has the best work-shirts on the island. Each day I cook three meals for anyone and everyone working in the cane. As well I trudge twice a day to the workers with smoko: a billy of hot black tea and biscuits. I try not to notice the tracks, varying in size from the thickness of my finger to that of my wrist, which show that snakes have slithered across the dirt track, maybe twenty since the tractor has passed earlier that morning. Meanwhile the windmill turns and clinks, turns and clinks. Is this all? It’s meaningless without children.
Soon this will change, and suddenly. The most miraculous happening at Rita Island is the birth of my first child. Coming after more than four years of apparent sterility, visits to specialists in Sydney and Townsville to find the reason, and many disappointments, it seems a total miracle, as every birth is. The birth of a first then a second child, especially miraculous against a background of hardship, will redeem this time and this place. But first, a word about medical practice North Queensland style. Most northeners are tougher than I am. I’ve been a coward since childhood and the system is not for the faint-hearted. When LF has a skin cancer on the back of his neck, the doctor leads him out into the sun, where the light is better he says, sits him straddling a chair with his head over the chair-back and cuts it out on the spot, blood everywhere. The half-dozen stitches are so tight that his adam’s apple and the flesh on his jaw are pulled to the
right for quite some time, giving him a sardonic smirk. The doctor is very satisfied with himself — There you go; not enough radium in Queensland to kill that one!
My first experience is when I have an emergency operation for what is thought to be an ectopic pregnancy, but turns out to be simply an ovarian cyst. This happens on my husband’s thirty-second birthday, 10 October 1950. I am just twenty-three, too young to be carved up in the way that I am. This takes place in a small cottage hospital in a back street of Ayr. Why I am not sent to the public hospital, where there is at least a fully equipped operating theatre, or even to Townsville where there are specialists, I don’t know, but at this time no-one questions a doctor’s decisions. I learn later that the doctor, a young woman acting as locum for my GP, has had to send up to the Ayr hospital for equipment for the operation. Perhaps she just wanted to try her hand. In any case what should have been a routine thing ends up as major surgery.
I wake up in the late afternoon in a four-bed ward with the three other inmates watching me with some interest. It appears that I’ve been choking and to prevent me swallowing my tongue the doctor has put a large bodkin through it. I can hardly speak or swallow for days. A Spanish woman has her baby. Brought as a bride from Spain by an older man who’s made his fortune here, she is now fulfilling her part of the bargain, but hasn’t yet learned enough English to distinguish between pain and pan, so she seldom gets what she wants. Meanwhile the floors are swilled with a dirty rag by a snaggle-toothed old man whose head appears over the edge of the mattress when least expected, staring curiously at whatever is going on there. When I’m recovering, the nurse invites me to go out and pee (as she puts it) on the front lawn, rather than bring me a bed-pan during the night — this hospital is very primitive.