Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  When my mother’s released we take her for a holiday (I use the term loosely) to New Brighton near Billinudgel, the site of her girlhood romance — perhaps a misguided choice. Here my aunty has the holiday house that has been the site of many family dramas. The house is right on the beach but behind a terrace of sandhills. We are no sooner established than the 1954 cyclone, possibly the most destructive ever, sweeps in from the Pacific bringing mountainous seas which, for the first time in memory, wash right up over the terrace and down through the lower storey of the house and all the others on the beachfront. We’re up to our knees in sea water in the kitchen. At the height of the cyclone the new jetty at the Bay is smashed to pulpwood and the fishing fleet, secured on top of it, is washed away, smashed up, and littered on the beaches from the Bay to the Queensland border. Meanwhile Lismore is flooded, the water reaching the first floor of the hotel occupied so recently by the Queen and her retinue, and raising the possibility, if it had happened a little earlier, of a constitutional crisis — Careless colonials drown the Queen!

  My problems are much simpler; a screaming baby, a mother who is almost catatonic with depression, and a husband and father who pal up and spend far too much time at Ma Ring’s hotel at Billinudgel, another sacred site for the men in my family. The aged licensee repeatedly mistakes my father for his brother, a sergeant of police at Murwillumbah, and plies him with bottles of whisky. He doesn’t argue. She even cooks, in the hotel kitchen, the roast he’s been sent to buy for dinner so the truants can stay a few hours longer. This is known as a family holiday, and I’m more than relieved to get back to Rita Island where I can sort out the baby’s problems (and mine). He had been put onto powdered cow’s milk soon after birth and is apparently allergic to it. He can vomit up the whole contents of a bottle, then scream and scream for more. These screaming bouts accompany the visit to the hospital in Brisbane, the cyclone at New Brighton then the long trip home, after which the doctor changes him to goats’ milk and he begins to thrive.

  We’ve been in the north for five and a half years when there is a sudden change in our circumstances. Almost simultaneously we get the phone and electricity. I use my new toy to summon a truant home if he is late at the RSL Club, thus spoiling a man’s pleasure, and to ring the doctor when the children have croup, choke on Pear’s soap, eat cunjevoi, a poisonous rainforest lily, or drink turpentine — and they do all these things. They’re quite friendly with the snakes in the backyard, even finding a nest of baby tiger snakes, but are not bitten. The electricity means not just lights and power points and an electric stove, but best of all a washing machine. No longer will I need to search for wood in the bush, drag it home and light the copper to wash the nappies. But to buy these things I need my own money, for we are still in debt to the Agricultural Bank, so I decide to go back teaching. I find a childminder, an islander named Joy — she always arrives with a hibiscus in her hair — and organise myself into the workforce.

  The last half of 1955 finds me at the Home Hill Primary School, sampling the strange ways of the Queensland education system. The principal who welcomes me in the porch with the statement — Some day we’ll be able to manage without married women, but until then we’ll have to put up with things as they are! — obviously resents both married women teachers and those from the south. He directs me to sit at the back of a class for a week to watch a Queensland teacher do it the right way (I write long letters home). I’m then put in charge of over forty children in grade 1, there being no kindergarten class. There is no spare classroom, so the desks and blackboard are placed on the dirt under the school where the overflow from the bubblers at recess and lunchtime runs down under them and creates a muddy mess in which the children paddle their bare feet during the lessons. These children are supposed to be five years old, but some have been smuggled in at four and a half, and one of these has no English at all. Others have very little, for Home Hill is a heavily Italianised community.

  The system is biased towards the three Rs and during this first year the children are supposed to reach the reading, spelling and arithmetic standards of New South Wales children at the end of grade 2. So we begin the day with spelling, reading and arithmetic, after recess we do more arithmetic, reading and spelling, and the same after lunch. Poetry, singing, drawing, dancing and games are the icing on the cake and there’s little of it, for each Friday morning the principal, always on the alert for mistakes on my part, examines their books and tests all their work. This prescriptive regime might well explain the peculiar thinking of certain Queensland politicians — Joh? Pauline? — who’ve grown up with it. For me however this six months’ work is solely a means to an end, to improve my home and cut down on domestic slavery.

  At about this time, my father-in-law having died, my husband’s mother urges us to return to Grafton and buy the family farm. The conditions on which we occupy our soldier settlement farm are that it cannot be sold for five years, and then only to a qualified ex-serviceman. We have been here almost six years and have cleared and planted about forty acres of cane; we have also installed two pumps for irrigation. In this area it’s not simply a matter of clearing and planting; all the land has to be graded so that the water from the pumping point can run along the headland drains and into the furrows between the cane and so flood the field. Watering the cane is labour-intensive as, all day and sometimes well into the night, the pumps are pumping and water being redirected every couple of hours into a new set of drills. It’s taken us six years to clear and grade to the stage we are at, and we haven’t yet reaped the benefit of it, but we are both homesick and determine to go home.

  Before we leave however we experience the big cyclone of 1956 which crosses the Queensland coast almost overhead, flattening houses and cane fields and tearing the wheels off windmills. The winds, estimated at 130 miles an hour, beat up against Castle Hill in the centre of Townsville then divide and meet again on the other side, trashing everything in their path. Wooden beams and sheets of corrugated iron fly through the air like paper. Telephone poles on the line between Ayr and Townsville, made of steel as thick as railway lines (white ants eat wooden poles) are found with five complete turns in them: the winds have twisted them like corkscrews. Our only casualty, besides field after field of flattened cane, is the twelve-foot fan on the windmill which lies smashed on the ground twenty feet away. Over the next few days LF straightens the pieces, bolts them together, then climbs the ladder to the top of the mill with the heavy wheel roped to his back and, all alone, re-attaches it. This is a tremendous feat, not only of strength, said to have been inherited from his Swedish grandfather, but of independence, for he won’t ask for help from anyone.

  I leave Ayr on the Douglas DC3 in March 1956. The two children, aged four and two, are with me; my husband is to bring the car loaded with our special possessions and join us in Brisbane. The plane leaves the airfield and banks over Rita Island so that I get a bird’s-eye view of what has been my island home. There is the box-like house in its clearing with its brave little garden, its tractor shed and windmill. Close to it a cane fire has once more escaped and is roaring through the long grass towards the mud and mangroves where it will exhaust itself. It has already caught the posts of a particularly cantankerous neighbour’s fence and they are burning fiercely. From the air this seems trivial, but the lawyers will be busy with it for years, perhaps for a lifetime. I feel a wave of exultation as the plane turns south and flies at five thousand feet, no more, right down the length of the Great Barrier Reef and into Brisbane. I’m going home and I don’t look back.

  My father-in-law’s story

  The land we are about to buy, on a peninsula in the Clarence River, is family land, the connection going back to the early years of the twentieth century. It’s 1908 and my father-in-law is fourteen when he first comes to the farm he will eventually own. Although baptised Edward Henry von Wolcker he is now known as Eddie Walker. He was named Edward after his grandfather Edvard Anders von Wolcker, who once owned the manor ho
use Eckholmen in Varmland, and Henry after his father Hjalmar, who is now known as Harry Walker. Half Irish, half Swedish, he is an unusual hybrid in a nation of hybrids. He will always be an outsider, always slightly foreign.

  He has been sent from Kincumber Orphanage to St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, reputedly to train as a priest. He jumps the fence, as he puts it, and joins his Swedish father in a boarding house in Glebe. When two sisters in the medieval robes of Mary MacKillop’s Sisters of St Joseph, hands folded in their sleeves, come looking for him, determined to take him back, he runs in fear. He must get as far away as possible, far beyond the reach of the brown Joeys. For the rest of his life these bat-like figures, always in pairs, will turn up from time to time, imploring him to return to the Church. They will show up, still entreating, at his deathbed.

  He sees an advertisement for a farm boy on the distant Clarence River and stows away on an NCSN ship, hiding inside a coil of rope. He climbs the bank from the wharf and meets the farmer at the Crown Hotel at the end of Prince Street, directly opposite the picnic ground on Susan Island. He surveys the unfamiliar streetscape: the long skirts of the women brushing the scarcely dry flood mud as they stroll from shop to shop, hansom cabs lined up for hire and a bullock team, incongruous against the stately colonial banks, dragging its freight of logs along the street to the wharf. He is hired as a farmhand for a farm on the peninsula and is told to get out there straight away and start work. The peninsula, about three miles long and half a mile wide at most, lies between the Clarence and an anabranch known as Carrs Creek. Seen from the air in modern times it’s obviously part of the river rather than the land, one of the first parts to drown when the river rises and pulls the peninsula under, with its farms and crops and people and animals, and holds it there for a couple of days or more, as long as it suits.

  Seen from the air the peninsula looks like a leaf floating on the river, the point downstream in the current, the single gravel road the central rib and the leaf stem attaching it to the mainland upstream at a place appropriately called the Washout. When the river in flood reaches eighteen feet it pours over this narrow stem and the peninsula then becomes an island as much at the mercy of the water as the flotsam and jetsam on its surface: vast rafts of water hyacinth, drifting logs, the occasional dead dog or cow. In summer the leaf shape is deep green with maize, a chlorophyll factory; in autumn it’s clothed in mature corn, gold for the picking, much of it pulled down, smothered and festooned with the most marvellous blue and purple convolvulus.

  Eddie Walker walks the miles from Grafton through corn fields and cow paddocks and meets the creek near where the derelict Peters ice-cream factory now stands. He borrows a boat, rows himself across and begins his promenade of the peninsula which will become the focus of all his future longings, all his land hunger. The first farm he walks through belongs to a family of bachelors and spinsters who live there intact for half a century, unable to marry and almost too shy to speak to one another. Then, walking hard, he comes to a farm as old as the world: grey homestead, barn and outbuildings from hewn timber sinking into and merging with the rich earth. Here lives a patriarch with his numerous family, huge barns chockful of pumpkins, squash and gramma, cows feeding along the creek bank, young women milking the cows and cooking, young men working the earth and children underfoot — a world which is totally self-sufficient. He then comes to the farm on which he is to work: up with the morning star to feed the horses, picking corn into a horse-drawn dray for ten hours a day, husking corn in the barn at night and eating rough — corned beef and damper — then abrupt dismissal when the year’s corn is picked and in the barn.

  The patriarch finds him walking back down the peninsula, homeless and crying like the child he still is. He takes him home and treats him like a member of the family. One more makes no difference. The hessian mattresses are filled freshly each year with shredded corn husks, the blankets are corn bags covered with cretonne, the famous colonial wogga rugs. There is plenty of work, plenty of food but no pay, for money is almost irrelevant here. He thrives with this family and grows strong; at sixteen he goes cane-cutting downriver in the cane-fields around Harwood sugar mill, but still the peninsula is the image in his mind of peace and prosperity — the cornucopia of the river land.

  He meets Joe Young, his first real friend since leaving the orphanage. They cut cane together around Chatsworth Island until 1914, then go to Brisbane to enlist, thinking this war will be quite a lark. They are both nineteen when they land at Gallipoli and in 1916 go together to France. He comes back to Chatsworth Island, the left side of his face disfigured, and in 1918 marries Joe Young’s sister. Joe is lost in the battle of Le Hamel. With two brothers and a brother-in-law dead on the Somme, his best memories are tied up with the peninsula.

  He returns to the peninsula in 1928, having made his money on a succession of farms commencing with the soldier-settlement block on Turkey Island. He buys the farm he first worked on as a fourteen-year-old, and then the one next to it. He is now a substantial man of property and, more importantly, the river is kind to him. There are no floods from 1928 until 1943, and in this time he builds a grand house on the bank overlooking a brimming reach of the creek, its surface almost covered with purple waterlilies. Its style is proudly federation and its cool verandahs look out over the water. He plants an orchard, including the pecan tree which later forms an umbrella over the lives of the family, and, most daring for one so frugal, buys a car. Six years later his youngest son is born, the only one not named after a dead or disfigured member of the first AIF but doomed nonetheless. Then comes the second war.

  Another story: It is 1917. Recuperating in England from the reconstruction of his face and jaw, Eddie Walker is given leave to visit his dead mother’s family in Tipperary. This Catholic family is still seething over wrongs both recent and ancient: the failure of the Easter rebellion the year before and the savage executions of its leaders by the British, and also the fields they lost in the British land-grabs of the 1850s, straight after the famine. The farm, now owned by his mother’s only brother, an elderly bachelor, is still substantial, with a long, low, thatched dwelling house, barns and byres. There is no heir and his uncle tries to persuade him to bury his Australian uniform, masquerade as an Irishman, melt into the disaffected Catholic population and inherit the farm. Though tempted he refuses, perhaps repelled by the tribalism of the Irish, perhaps averse to deserting his mates in the trenches. It’s a long way to Tipperary, in more ways than one, for an Australian digger. The seventy-year-old uncle then marries a young woman and fathers two sons.

  And a worse one: In the mid-1930s he receives an unsigned letter from England. It is tattered, travel-stained and incoherent. It has been redirected several times, from the boarding-house in Glebe where his Swedish father used to live, to Chatsworth Island and then, by someone who knows his whereabouts, to the farm on the peninsula. It’s a cry for help from someone who is obviously half-mad. To follow it up he would need to find the money to go to England and track down the sender, yet he is haunted by the fear that this letter might be from his younger brother, listed as missing after the battle of Pozières in 1916, then automatically pronounced killed in action at the end of that year. Perhaps he still lives, incarcerated in some institution in England, perhaps faceless or blind, perhaps hopelessly crippled, yet longing every hour to be found and brought home. My father-in-law does nothing, but thinks about it a lot.

  Pillars of fire

  The creek in front of the farmhouse floats in its own light. It’s the home of snake and platypus, fringed with hyacinth, afloat with the blue cups of the lotus flower. Sacred kingfishers dip into its waters and ibis stalk its banks. The waterbirds of the world choose it: the pelicans, the jabiru and the colony of black swans who nest alongside the Washout. The swans dip down towards the surface of the creek at sundown, coming home to rest. Occasionally the wings of a swan tip both wires of the power lines over the creek, fusing all the lights in the house as the big bird drops like a s
tone into the water. Eels and catfish live in the depths among the fleshy stems of the waterlilies, a submarine forest with the same bloodthirsty rules as the rainforest on the island.

  The eels not only make war on their own kind, they also tear the webbed feet off any domesticated ducks crazy enough to venture into the creek. Eels and catfish are considered vermin, unfit to be eaten. The catfish, fat and pallid creatures with poisonous whiskers, mewl and squeak as fishermen spike them through their bony skulls then throw them up onto the grass to bleed and die. At dusk the fruit bats from the island dip down to the surface to sip the water then undulate on their way. At dawn it’s not unusual to look down on the creek from a front bedroom window and see a fishing boat rocking on the surface in the grey light, netting the creek for mullet, bream and an occasional small shark. Some mornings the house floats on the mist like a ship at sea until the mist gradually disperses, bringing us back to earth.

  One of the first things I do when we arrive is to open a door from the back verandah into the lounge-room; a door which has been locked for almost thirty years. This creates a new breezeway from one end of the house to the other and will hopefully clear out the ghosts of old memories and make way for a new family. No more will those spectral figures from the Somme stand by the pianola as it grinds out It’s a long way to Tipperary, for the pianola has gone to town with the old people. Instead little children will, for the first time for twenty years, play around the wide verandahs, learn to swim in the creek, play with miniature tractors and farm machinery in the dirt under the house and swing from the overhanging pecan tree. I then claim the garden as my own, planting all the old familiar flowers from my Granny’s garden, the may bush, the jasmine, the wisteria, the buddleia and the black boy roses. The peach trees are fruiting when we arrive and I beat the flying foxes to the peaches, making pies and preserves, using the big fuel stove, establishing my place.