Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  What does goad me is the way that the froth has risen to the top in the fifteen or so years since I first began teaching. My immediate superiors include a neurotic woman who won’t allow a piano in the school because of her nerves and, when I am shifted to a co-educational school, several men whom I recall as having barely passed their exams at teachers college. These have prospered, often by window-dressing for the inspector. An example is the long and unnecessary weekly staff-meetings imposed by one of my superiors in which he gives instruction to the staff on simple tasks they’ve been doing well for years. He rocks on his heels before us as he pontificates, boring and humourless as a dog. Dull as he is, he’s determined to succeed. Minutes, carefully kept for the inspector, imply that this principal has instructed and improved his staff. We all resent this, but know that it’s the way to get ahead as a primary school teacher. Many of the most innovative students at teachers college have long ago left for other places where creativity and vision are valued.

  A temporary woman teacher, on sufferance as it were, isn’t supposed to talk about her children in the staffroom, let alone make any allowance for looking after them, and desperate measures need to be taken if a child is sick. I’m meticulous about this, but my loyalty to the system is tested in the aftermath of the big flood which has left a muddy lagoon through the middle of the farm between the house and the road to town. The car is parked on this road and each day when I’m ready to go I have to wade through perhaps a hundred yards of shin-deep muddy water with the boys, carrying our shoes and stockings/socks, while my husband carries our daughter, a bucket of clean water and some towels. On the other side we wash our feet, finish dressing and drive off to school for the day as if nothing has happened. This continues for ten long weeks as the expanse of slushy mud slowly dries up, until one day we are at last able to drive all the way up to the house. To mention this at school would be seen as special pleading for what is essentially a private matter.

  Soon I begin not only to look over the fence, but to look up at the stars. Ever since I left teachers college I’ve longed to read and study, to do a university degree. For someone in my position this seems totally presumptuous, like demanding an invitation to the Race Ball, but it’s a burning desire which can’t be suppressed forever. I long to test the limits of my mind, to become a part of what I see as a higher realm of thought. I know that it’s possible to study at a distance, away from the university, for several of the men with whom I work are doing courses at the University of New England. Their main aim is promotion, and the Department of Education encourages this to the extent of paying their fees, a privilege which, I soon discover, is not available for temporary (that is women) teachers. After passing one university course with distinction and paying for it myself, I attempt to join the permanent staff, not for advancement but simply to have my fees paid.

  I discover that the official excuse for keeping women like myself as temporary is that, being married, we are considered unable to move to another area. This is quite transparent. Not one of the men who works with me would take a shift if it were offered — they’re all quite open about this — nor would they be demoted to temporary if they refused. So I proceed, filling in the forms to apply for permanency and, when I come to the question — Are you willing to serve anywhere in the state of NSW? — I take a deep breath and tick the yes box. I don’t like to lie but I’m quite confident that, as the male members of staff are never asked to shift, I won’t be either.

  My application is processed, even to the stage of having a medical examination for superannuation, and I’m quietly confident — until three days before school starts the following year, when a telegram orders me to transfer immediately to a small school on the coalfields outside Cessnock. It’s obvious that I’ve been set up to punish my presumption. I ring the transfer officer in the Department of Education at Bridge Street, Sydney, an address which inspires respect and even fear in many teachers, for the department is all powerful. He’s extremely hostile and has obviously been waiting for my call. I grovel. I remind him that I have a husband, as well as three children at high school, and can’t shift. He enjoys it. He instructs me to either take the shift or telegraph a cancellation of my application for permanency. I send the telegram, bitter about the level of hypocrisy in the department. But there is a sequel: the local inspector of schools hears of my treatment and is disgusted. During the next year when he is relieving the area director of Education he processes my application and sees that it succeeds. At last I am on the permanent staff and my university study is paid for. But there’s a nasty taste to this. I would rather it had happened through some just process than through special pleading. What happens to people who don’t have an influential patron?

  The garden of Ceres

  This contest with the Education Department and my subsequent university study take place under the darkening shadow of family drama. Just before I go back teaching my father leaves for Tasmania; as far away as he can get, he says, without going to the South Pole. He is not alone. When my mother knows that he’s gone she begins to shake. Her trembling becomes uncontrollable. Since eighteen and probably well before that she’s been terrified of betrayal, of desertion, and with good reason. But still she can’t believe it, after thirty-two years of marriage. She sits on a bed in the front room of the farmhouse, dark and withdrawn, and nothing will stop her trembling. I send for my own doctor who, and this is quite unusual, agrees to drive out to the farm (dusty road, new Buick). He surveys her misery with clinical detachment, says that she’ll probably never improve and should perhaps be institutionalised. He isn’t known for sympathetic dealings with women. He’s just warned me against the hysterectomy I need because, he says, the resulting rearrangement of this and that has been known, on occasion, to hinder a husband’s pleasure!

  She’s then treated by a series of country doctors; at this time there’s no Prozac, no magic pill for unhappiness. One well-intentioned medico decides to hypnotise her and alter her thinking patterns while she’s under, but finds himself staring into such an abyss that he steps back smartly and, instead, sends her to Dr Harry Bailey, a Sydney psychiatric specialist much in favour at the time. Many country GPs are sending their difficult cases there. We take her to see Dr Bailey in his Macquarie Street offices and it’s soon obvious that he’s himself deranged. For the whole of our interview he’s in a state of maniacal rage and doesn’t attempt to hide it. He interrupts us several times to rant on the phone, abusing a gang of carpet layers working in his home. He directs us to take my mother to a private hospital and not enquire about her or visit for ten days. He assures us that she’ll be in a deep and calming sleep for the whole of that time, and will wake up a different person.

  The truth about Harry Bailey comes out twenty years later. There is a Royal Commission into his deep sleep treatments at Chelmsford Hospital and he suicides. We learn that most of his patients were women suffering from depression due to some crisis in their lives, perhaps something as simple and even universal as poverty or a broken marriage. Under deep sleep sedation, deep down to the level of coma, many of these patients lay, uncleaned and unattended, in their own excrement for weeks on end, some with their legs glued together with bedsores. Shock treatments were given without anaesthetic and when some died of pneumonia and other side effects, their records were falsified. His activities were ignored by the Department of Health, by assisting doctors and by most of the nursing staff, such was the aura of infallibility surrounding this psychiatrist and his quackery. The deep sleep therapy, now seen as extremely dangerous, and the numerous shock treatments administered by Harry Bailey further damage my mother.

  Returning home even less able to cope with her depression, she begins to self-administer. She takes Relaxatabs, sedatives that are at this time freely available, and soon becomes addicted to them, as well as to the Serepax the doctor prescribes for sleeping. She sits for days in a velvet armchair in the jewelled rays of light through the stained-glass window in her flat, the a
ir somnolent with dust-motes. She increases the dose every time reality threatens and the floor is littered with the small cellophane wrappers of the drug. Soon, she knows, she will go to pieces and be taken away to hospital so she takes more, just in case. She falls into bed at any time of the day and then stays up, agitated and hyperactive, all night. Sometimes she collapses on the floor, isn’t found for twenty-four hours, and wakes up, unrepentant, in hospital.

  Her flat is in a musty old mansion, a warren of fibro partitions, makeshift kitchens and bathrooms, shared by deserted wives, pensioners and derelicts. The stench of rising damp and spent gas mingles with the miasma of depression. She inhabits what was once the grand drawing room, lit from the garden end by a massive semicircular stained-glass window. The baroque wallpaper and ornate plaster ceiling are stained from half a century of leaking slates, and further discoloured from her obsessive smoking. In the hazy light filtering through the stained glass she labours from armchair to bed to sink to armchair, caring for nothing but the drugs with which she dulls her mind.

  She has notebooks for this, notebooks for that. In one she notes the time in beautifully fashioned numbers, for she was always neat. Every five minutes on the minute she writes down the time, checks it on a series of clocks and makes sure they synchronise. Although her time is eternal she must note the passing of every minute. She goes carefully through the Daily Examiner each day, checking for spelling mistakes. She’s still proud of her perfect spelling. She cuts out each misspelt word carefully and puts it into a special envelope. At the end of the year she will post the bulging envelope to the editor, and so rebuke his carelessness. She still has some sense of humour. In another notebook she writes — Oh No! Oh No! Oh No! — endlessly, covering page after page in copperplate script. She’s caught in a spiral of depression, wheel within wheel, wheel without end.

  An overgrown colonial garden fronts the old mansion, and at its centre is a mossy statue of Ceres, the mother of the harvest. Ceres is the goddess who descended into the underworld to rescue her daughter from the powers of darkness. Every Saturday for the endless years of my servitude I push my way through the overgrown garden, past the classical statue, its eyes serene and unknowing, and knock on the triple-fronted door, never knowing what I’ll find, dreading every descent into the underworld and returning always without the slightest hope.

  This is the most painful period of my life, more painful even than a childhood in the shadows. I’m humbled again and again, pleading with her to stop taking the drugs she can’t do without, pleading with doctors to stop her destroying herself, and dealing with her repeated collapses and admissions to one hospital or clinic after another. I descend again and again into the realm of psychosis, come out empty-handed and return to my family unable to relax and smile on them. Worst of all is my fear that her condition is genetic and that I’m condemned to repeat it. Meanwhile my sympathy is mixed with a bitter resentment. I want to force her to know me, to acknowledge my love. But people who take drugs to block out their own feelings are oblivious to the needs of others and, inside, she’s determined never to relinquish her pain. Once I find her in a coma with the open bottle of pills on the bedside table and know that, as soon as she opens her eyes, she’ll take the rest. The temptation to walk away and leave her is ovewhelming. I screw the lid on the bottle, hide it and, once again, call an ambulance.

  I don’t, in my stilted letters to my father, tell him anything of this; to do so would suggest blame, and it’s not as simple as that. Her spiral lasts, in different flats and houses, sometimes improving for a couple of years then regressing, until she goes into a nursing home twenty-three years after he leaves and eleven years after his death. Only then can I pass most of the responsibility over to others. I don’t begrudge him his happiness, but things could have been very different had they resolved their differences twenty, or even thirty, years earlier; she could perhaps have made a life of her own. Now in meatworks in Burnie and Launceston he reverts to the lowest level of work, doing an extra job at night to send the money to support her. He comes home at sixty-three and buys his own place, seven acres on a quiet creek in the hinterland behind Ballina. He dams the creek and makes a swimming pool, labels all the trees in the patch of rainforest along the creek, ploughs up an acre of rich red soil, plants his fruit trees and vegetables, and then he dies.

  Sometimes I catch a glimpse of him in one or other of his grandsons: in the unguarded line of a profile on this one, in the way the hair grows thick and unruly on another, or in a familiar flash of bad temper from any one of them. But most of all I remember him by his hands. His hands were square and strong. They were gnarled as tree trunks, toughened by work. They earned the bread for other people for fifty years without faltering. They grubbed lantana up Terania Creek at fourteen, shovelled gravel at The Pocket and shore the sheep at Minnie Downs. They lifted the heavy bags of wheat and lumped them across the railway platform at Wallangarra. They sliced the meat and made the sausages on innumerable blocks in country butcher shops.

  But life was not all work. These are the hands that snatched the football from the air and scored the winning try just before the final whistle, rigged up lures for unlucky fish from the Bay to the trout streams of Tasmania and, wherever he was, planted his thousands of tomato and lettuce plants, pressing them carefully down into the loose and fertile dirt. And then they were still.

  Down by the Salley Gardens

  I am thirty-eight years old. I sit at a small table in front of the window overlooking the creek and begin the first essay of my university study. The time is now ripe; my youngest child is eight and my husband is working away from home, sometimes for ten days at a time. I teach school during the day but my nights are lonely. I place a neat stack of typing paper beside the portable Olivetti typewriter which I bought to do the minutes for the Young Wives Club, take a deep breath and begin, tentatively, to do what I’ve longed to do for twenty years. This is the first of thirteen assignments in English I, and is an analysis of Yeats’s poem ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. I know of Yeats from my Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a prize from the Presbyterian Assembly for learning a chapter of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians by heart. It’s been my constant companion since, but the only Yeats poems in it are a couple of simple lyrics concluding with my favourite, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’:

  In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

  And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

  She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

  But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

  This is no preparation for the complexity of ‘A Prayer For my Daughter’ and, as far as my studies go, or anything else for that matter, I’ve no intention of taking life easy. Rather the opposite: I’ll soon become so obsessed that all my previous dreams — of building a tropical paradise on a soldier-settler farm, or of quiet prosperity on the peninsula — will be supplanted by this one.

  At this time we are supposed to look at a poem as a work of art, almost a painting in words, and we concentrate not only on its meaning, but also on the poet’s amazing skill with words, the way he’s able to play upon the emotions of the reader. This approach is now considered old-fashioned, but I’m good at it, for it requires those patterning skills I mentioned earlier, the ability to see relationships, to make connections. Overdoing it, as I will always do, I study everything I can find about Yeats, feel an instant empathy with him and discover that my Irish heritage is very close to his. Years later when I go to Ireland to study Irish literature I find that the inner walls of Drumcliff Church, where Yeats is buried and where his grandfather was rector, are lined with marble memorials to dead members of my family, and many of them are buried there (around the back, away from the tourist coaches). If I’m an Irish Protestant (by descent) and so, I suppose, something of an outcast in the Republic of Ireland, I might as well have a few monuments to establish my identity, to tell me where I came from.


  From then on every essay becomes an exhilarating trial and its completion a triumph. The approach to literature at the time is chronological so, in a daze of delight, I work my way through Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, Spenser and Donne and through the Romantic poets to the Moderns. And that’s just the poetry; there are novels and plays as well. I go to my first weekend school at Sydney University and for the first time step inside its sandstone colonnades, trodden by the feet of generations of students, not to mention literary figures like Christopher Brennan. Sacked from the university for a certain lack of decorum (drunkenness and incontinence), Brennan rivalled the European Symbolists in his poetry, not to mention the flamboyant details of his life.

  I feel totally overawed by the other students, especially young women who take it as their right, and the most natural thing in the world, to immerse themselves in study, sometimes for a lifetime of one course after another, just for the sake of learning. There’s also the other extreme: next to me sits a self-assured middle-aged woman who questions one of the tutors provocatively. Later she will progress to a love affair with him and boast about it. I’m amazed at her open flouting of the conventions. Nothing has prepared me for this. These people seem sophisticated, bohemian and beyond my reach, for even the cappuccino that we share in Glebe Point Road is new to me. The tutor who marks my assignments, and whom I’ve visualised as a scholarly young Don from Oxford or Cambridge, turns out to be an elderly South African with gravy stains on his tie who shuffles about the lecture room in carpet slippers. Is this what university life is like? I’m quite overwhelmed.