Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  My first memories are of living in a rented house known as Arkinstall’s house. I must be about one year old or less as I lie on my back on a bed, kicking my feet while my mother puts on my shoes and socks. Certainly a harmless enough memory. Another is of sliding on my bottom down a dangerous and precipitous flight of timber stairs, which I now discover to be astonishingly level and ordinary. Here my sister and I lick the raindrops from the verandah railing when it rains, with no thought of lead poisoning, pick cosmos and marigolds in the garden, mandarins from a loaded tree with all the kids around, sit in the thick clover and make clover-chains, and run ourselves stupid in the warm dusk. We have a few pieces of furniture we later cart through a series of rented rural dumps — a double brass bed, a three-quarter bed for the children, a table, two chairs and a stool, some pieces of second-hand linoleum worn through in places to the hessian backing, and some chintz curtains which are re-done and re-hung in a series of houses.

  From this house my mother takes me one day to a barber shop in Lismore. I am then about eighteen months old. She has decided that my hair is too fine and wispy (it still is) and popular opinion has it that hair that is shaved grows strongly ever after. The barber is a little astonished by her request. He puts a board across the arms of the barber’s chair and hoists me up to where I can see my image full frontal in the mirror. To my horror he takes a razor and shaves a wide path right over the top. They both laugh at the result. Then, deftly and quickly, he shaves all the rest, exposing a pink scalp, bare as a nut. Looking back, I can’t believe that anyone would actually do this to a little girl. This is not something I’ve been told — no-one has mentioned it since — but to me it has the clarity of a moment frozen in time; the surprise of it, the horror, the bald and knobbly pink head so vulnerable. I wear a crochet cap, hot and sticky, for months, but the other kids make a game of it, chase me and throw the cap away. I stumble after it, they pull it off again. Sookie! Sookie! Sookie! they cry, Sookie-bah! meaning calf, cry-baby, and I am.

  We bath in a zinc tub in front of the kitchen stove, and it is here that my five-year-old sister — I am three — is sent to wash me. I stand in the warm water; she decides it is not warm enough and lifts the heavy kettle off the fire, staggers across to the tub with it, and splashes the boiling water on my legs. This accident, for which she is beaten, is the first of a series which continue until well into my adult life and perhaps account for a certain resentment despite my love for her, or perhaps resentment of an older sister is normal. The schoolteacher, a veteran of the first war and the authority on snakebite and injury in the village, is called to attend to my burns. Sickness is difficult in a village with only two private phones and one wireless. Much later I see my mother go to the general store to ring the doctor about my sister who is diagnosed with a mysterious illness called erysipelas. The word rings in the ear, strangely dangerous and threatening. What does it mean? I still don’t know but, more than sixty years later, my sister still suffers from exotic illnesses that puzzle and delight the specialists and extend their knowledge, while my disabilities are depressingly ordinary.

  From this house we begin to attend the Anglican Sunday school in The Channon hall. Their one hymn seems to be ‘There Is a Green Hill Far Away’:

  There is a green hill far away

  Without a city wall

  Where our dear Lord was crucified.

  He died to save us all.

  I wonder why the green hill has no wall (without a city wall), but swoon with pity for the beautiful young man so cruelly crucified — He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good. All my childhood, Easter and the agony of the crucifixion has this same effect on me, I am filled with shame for my sins and promise and long to be good, whatever that means. In my family it means being unquestioningly submissive (Don’t you dare contradict me! Don’t answer back!) and any hint of disobedience is instantly and cruelly punished — an arm seized in a vice-like grip, or a stinging smack to the soft back of the knees. Meanwhile we two are on sufferance at Sunday school, for we take our own Presbyterian catechism with us, as a sign of what our mother considers to be the higher morality to which we belong. We are the only members of the reformed church in an overwhelmingly Church of England village.

  Our mother has been forced to marry in an Anglican rather than a Presbyterian church under the threat, by our Granny, of withholding permission for her son, the nineteen-year-old bridegroom, to marry. The bride is eighteen and powerless, but makes up for it later. This accounts for the strange ceremony which takes place when I am six, and an itinerant Presbyterian preacher baptises me in the kitchen with water from the tank. My father, who is disgusted by the whole affair and makes no secret of it, is summoned from the butcher’s shop to make his solemn vow to raise me as a Presbyterian, and comes hurrying up the hill wiping his hands on his striped and bloodied butcher’s apron. The service is half over when he arrives, so the preacher, in deference to what he sees as the finer feelings of the young father, begins again at the beginning, while I squirm in resentment and embarrassment. The reverend is an amateur phrenologist and the study of the bumps on the head is taken very seriously at this time. So he proceeds to read the head of the newly christened child, and then that of the father. For me he prescribes a particularly good memory and for my father a very bad temper — he’s right on both counts. My christening, then, is quite unorthodox. It’s not doctrinal, but an act of revenge on my father’s family. It also further marks us out in the village as different, for the values which rule this small society are both stable and rigid, and to depart from them in religion or race marks one as an outsider.

  The values in this village, and in many similar in Australia at the time, are those of Anglicanism, patriotism and mateship. The last two exclude foreigners and blacks. There are no Aborigines to be seen, even in Lismore; they are isolated — for their own good, it is said — on islands in the Richmond and Clarence Rivers and at other mission stations. An occasional Hindu, perhaps descended from the many who helped clear the rainforest, grows and sells vegetables in the area. One beheads another in the main street of Lismore and is later hanged for it. The beheading is discussed as a mysterious and bloodthirsty foreign ritual, just what you would expect from such barbarous people. The Italian families with banana plantations up in the hills are despised as Dagoes; the two nationalities rarely mix. Later, when we are at war with Mussolini, they are forced to run the gauntlet through the village to get to Lismore for supplies. It is said that their cars were pelted with garbage by some of the women whose husbands were fighting the Italians and Germans in the Middle East.

  To return to the facts of childhood: the second house we live in is called Paterson’s house, built by a prosperous farmer specially to rent to my father, for people with money made much more money during the Depression. I am four or five at this time, and don’t yet go to school. I hang around the builders, playing with wooden blocks and curls of shavings. The builder and his wife live in a tent on site and the wife gives me a bundle of scraps from her dressmaking. This seems to me the most glorious treasure in the world. I create fantastic and botched clothes for my dolls, and so begins a lifelong and sensual love of glamorous textiles, of their colour and feel, and of the exotic clothes which I try to make from them. In this house I suffer another scarring episode when my parents return late at night from a wedding, wake us up and present my sister with a beautiful (to our eyes at that time) celluloid doll, but pretend not to have one for me. There are storms of tears, hilarity at my distress, until finally another doll is drawn from behind my father’s back and, tiring of the joke, they tell me to shut up and get to sleep. Their faces are elongated and distorted as they lean over my bed, holding the kerosene lamp high, then they retreat laughing into the darkness. I lie awake, heaving with rage and suppressed sobs. Later my sister, experimenting with matches, lights the foot of my doll and it explodes in flames.

  In this house we have card evenings by the light of kerosene lamps. Euchre and
crib are the preferred games, the score for crib kept by wax matches stuck in a crib board. On other evenings paper roses are being made to decorate The Channon hall for a ball. Crepe paper is cut into petals and teased into full-blown roses and buds, and these are stacked in cardboard boxes ready for decoration. Here I am burnt again. My mother leans over the two sleeping children with the kerosene lamp to see if we are alright, and the glass globe on the lamp falls on the back of my leg and burns it. By this time I am quite scarred — home is, it seems, a dangerous place. By the time I am five I have been scalded, burned, run down and knocked unconscious by a bolting horse and had my head shaved. It’s strange that I can hardly recall the incident with the bolting horse and certainly feel no resentment. This is probably because it had no possible connection with my family. I have no-one to blame.

  The hall is the venue for the two balls and a number of dances held during the year. The balls are serious and formal occasions. The hall is decorated with as much crepe paper as country taste allows (that’s plenty) and palm fronds and ferns from the rainforest. The result is an incongruous bower of native palms and pink crepe roses. Relatives come on horseback or in sulkies from all around — from Rosebank, Dunoon, Keerrong, Nimbin and Blakebrook — with suits and long evening dresses in calico bags. Children slide on the waxed floors between the formal dances. Women short of a partner sometimes choose a child to dance with. I view this with horror. Too often I have been clutched to a heavy bosom about eye-height, and swung off my feet, nose squashed close to the armpit of some girl (bush heifers my father called them) down on horseback from a remote farm up Tuntable Creek. Straight bobs are in fashion at this time, and kiss-curls are arranged in a formal row across the forehead. The combination of cushiony bosoms, kiss-curls set in place with spit and sweaty armpits is overpowering. Children escape, run in and out of the hall, play outside in the warm dusk or moonlight, gorge on sandwiches and rich cakes for supper and finally, sated, are put to sleep on rugs under the supper tables, while the serious dancing and courting goes on until dawn.

  The children’s fancy-dress ball is another important event. There exists in the village a catalogue of fancy-dress costumes which can be hired from a firm in the Strand Arcade in Sydney, but this is far too expensive for most mothers, so the costumes are copied (more or less). Many are the Arcadian shepherdesses and gypsies, or the nationals of France, Italy, Spain and South America in fantastic costumes long forgotten in their own lands. Some elaborate costumes appear year after year, worn proudly by successive members of a family. Many are the groans from the adults as someone comes round for the fifth or sixth consecutive year in the same once splendid but now shabby and ill-fitting costume. I go as a workbag (a cretonne romper with ribbon shoulder straps), a rose with crepe-paper petals, sepals and leaves (these two are copied from the catalogue) and (my mother’s own invention) a pansy.

  Other communal activities are the annual trips to the beach arranged by the lodges. Everyone, according to class and religion, belongs to either the Protestant Alliance or Manchester Unity. Protestant Alliance is by far the most acceptable; the Anglicans and the fashionable people belong to this organisation, while the non-conformists (including us) are Manchester Unity. For the lodge picnics we all assemble with great excitement at the baker’s shop with our towels and togs and are loaded onto a bus for Byron Bay, Ballina, Brunswick Heads or Evans Head. On one of these trips my mother and I are taken up for a joy flight in a Tiger Moth piloted, I am told, by Charles Kingsford Smith. He lands and takes off from the beach at Evans Head. We also go on our one holiday to New Brighton where our aunty has a beach house, trudging the mile or so from the railway station at Billinudgel, carrying our luggage in the dark. We swim and fish, drifting in a rowing boat on the Brunswick River while our parents pull in bream and flathead, and drink a bottle of beer between them. This is the one holiday they have in the eight years that we live at The Channon.

  There are wonderful times for me in this second house. My mother plants one of her famous gardens: pansies, stocks, verbena, poppies, primula and cineraria fill the air with their perfume. Masses of flowers are taken up to a flower show in the Dunoon hall, and she wins a number of prizes, a rare triumph in her life. I am alone at home, for my sister has started school. We go to Lismore and come home with a canary called Biddy; a big cage is built and more canaries come. They sing riotously, lay eggs, hatch chicks and multiply. I lie on the bare boards of the verandah by the canaries’ cage; I swoon with rapture at their music; I chant the words of the poem recited at a concert in the hall the night before by the kids from Koonorigan school, which I have instantly committed to memory. It is Henry Kendall’s ‘Song of the Cattle-Hunters’:

  While the morning light beams on the fern-matted streams,

  And the water-pools flash in its glow,

  Down the ridges we fly, with a loud ringing cry —

  Down the ridges and gullies we go!

  and the cattle we hunt, they are racing in front,

  With a roar like the thunder of waves;

  As the beat and the beat of our swift horses feet

  Start the echoes away from their caves!

  As the beat and the beat

  of our swift horses’ feet

  Start the echoes away from their caves.

  This is poetry; this is magic; I am in ecstasy. I now compulsively create my own poems, writing them down as soon as I can write, and sending them to the children’s pages in the Woman’s Mirror and the Northern Star. I collect merit certificates for my poems, as my mother collects prize certificates for her pansies. Meanwhile the Northern Star begins to serialise The Wizard of Oz and we skip with Dorothy down the yellow brick road, believing once again that mythical Kansas is just over the next hill, up by Dunoon or Dorroughby.

  I have my mother to myself. The apricot-coloured birds sing their intricate and golden descants; my poetry unwinds itself in my head. The perfume of stocks and verbena mingles with that of the evening primroses, heavy with pollen along the roadside. The glad cries of children playing rounders at the school drift down on the summer air. It is playtime there, but I am alone with my mother in an enclosed and private world. It can’t, and doesn’t, get any better than this.

  At five and a half I go to school. I am avid to learn, especially to read. The school is a typical New South Wales one-teacher school. It is set on top of the hill behind a grove of coral trees. Too thorny to climb, the coral trees flourish their brilliant crimson fingers against the blue of the sky. To me they represent the gateway to a new world. I eagerly climb the hill with my sister who is two years ahead of me. The one-roomed school has long desks, blotched with ink and scarred with initials, and long forms to sit on. On the teacher’s red cedar desk are the tools of his high office — chalk, dusters, a rotating globe of the world, and the sacred roll which is ceremoniously marked each day, absence being almost a criminal offence. The map of the world shows intricate and extensive patches of deep pink; this, we are told, is the British Empire on which the sun never sets. Every year we celebrate Empire Day on the old Queen’s birthday with speeches, sports and lollies. The maps of Australia and New South Wales hang alongside the world map, together with an officious clock with Roman numerals, and we learn to recite rivers, towns and stops on the railway lines in the same way that we chant our tables, for rote learning is considered the only way.

  The teacher has returned, a changed and more thoughtful man, from the Great War. To the children he is a wise and encouraging mentor who seldom uses the cane. His name is Tom Smith and somehow this conveys his simple goodness. There are other returned soldiers in the village, one a raging and public drunk. With him always is his haunted and embarrassed wife, who attempts to explain his illness, and a nervous little boy the same age as myself. This man somehow tracks down our father for the next twenty years, wherever we live, bludges a few quid, then finally disappears; either by suicide or to what is known then as either the madhouse or the rathouse.

  Remind
ers of the Great War are everywhere, from the captured German guns in the park in Lismore to the roll of honour in the local hall and the impressively framed illuminated address on the schoolroom wall. King George V’s head and the coat of arms, crossed flags and pictures of the great generals of the war are arranged around a fulsome citation to the bravery of our teacher, who looks vaguely like Henry Lawson. Our folk-tales are grimmer than Grimm: they concern the Angel of Mons (a deadly apparition which appears above the smoke and flames of the battlefield); the Christmas truce in no-man’s land where Australian and German soldiers exchanged gifts in the snow; and the Leaning Virgin high on the spire of the cathedral at Albert. She has been damaged by the German bombardment of the cathedral. When she falls, it is said, the war will end. She does, and it doesn’t. These are the stories told to children. Meanwhile we stamp around the playground to the marching songs of the AIF, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentiers’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, not realising that the first is about a harlot and the second about a girl who’s been left behind by a soldier.

  There are many returned soldiers, and many more are left on Gallipoli or in France. The Great War has now become a tragic myth, haunting the consciousness of the children, particularly mine. I am profoundly disturbed by it and return to it continually with a morbid fascination. I dwell on the mementos of the dead, diaries, cigarette cases which have deflected bullets, the bullets themselves, put away reverently in cedar chests and brought out to show to little children. The solemnity of Anzac Day — when we pray to the God of our fathers known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line — affects me just as Easter does.