Roundabout at Bangalow Page 24

At this time the University of New England leads the world in Distance Education. The courses are highly organised, the principle being that External students should have access to the same lectures, the same teaching material, as those in residence. As two thirds of the students in the Arts Faculty are studying at a distance, and most of these are teachers, residential schools are held during the school vacation, where all the lectures for the year are crammed into two weeks. These schools are among my richest experiences. I never forget the rush of adrenalin that overcomes me when I first step into the Arts building, each room like a cell in a honeycomb filled with learning, or into the library where the very smell of the books, let alone their contents, fills me with rapture. This is not just the background to my life, it becomes the very essence of it; two thirds of my degree — the maximum allowed — is taken up with the study of literature. I skip the Jacaranda Festival to study, for the exams are always the week after it, sit for exams year after year in the enervating heat of church halls in Grafton and South Grafton, wait for my results the week before Christmas and, exhilarated anew, begin in the new year the reading for the next courses. Soon I do two a year.

  While this is absorbing my inner life there are practical changes. My husband, after the big flood which put our lives in danger, has determined to sell the farm, his decision reinforced by an accident when his big Massey Harris tractor, the pride of the farm, burns. It’s a fiery December day, the grass as dry as tinder, and he’s been ploughing near the barn. He comes home at midday, leaving the tractor in the field. We casually look up after lunch to a riveting sight: our tractor engulfed in flames. The shiny disc of the plough has caught and concentrated the sun’s rays onto the grass around the tractor. The grass has burst into flames which soon spread to the massive tyres. The tractor is framed in a blazing aureole. We ring the fire brigade and in the meantime organise a bucket chain from the tank to the fire, more than two hundred yards away. My husband, calm as usual and strong enough for two, strips the burning tyres off their rims with a shovel and so saves the tractor itself. I begin to wonder whether our bad luck, nine floods and now fire, will ever be over.

  Once we leave I refuse to revisit the Peninsula, and the farmhouse there becomes the second of those from which, in my mind, I’ve been dispossessed. I dream of it constantly and always as it was. But in all my dreams I’m an intruder, floating disembodied through the rooms, terrified that the real owners will return and cast me out with cruel words about trespass and property. The fact is that the old house is now unrecognisable. The Flood Mitigation Authority has at last raised the levee banks that protect South Grafton and this throws a much greater volume of floodwater back onto the Peninsula. I hear that, in recompense, the Authority has paid to raise each house by over a metre. So the old farmhouse is now off its brick foundations, perched like an ungainly box high on steel poles. The solid flights of stairs front and back, designed by my husband to link shady verandahs with gardens and lawns, in perfect proportion with the house, have been replaced by the cold steel rungs of what look like the galley-ways on a ship. The creek has been silted up by another thirty years of floods, and waterlilies no longer float on its surface. The truth is that the homes of my childhood and married love, including the gardens that I planted and tended myself, no longer exist. They will live on only in the imagination and memories of those who shared them.

  Why she is as she is

  She doesn’t enter the nursing home willingly. Early on she threatens suicide, to throw herself off the Grafton Bridge. Knowing she can’t get past the front desk, I tell her it’s her decision, something I didn’t dare tell her twenty years earlier. She writes, in her beautiful copperplate handwriting, to the Minister for Health asserting that her daughters have imprisoned her against her will, and demands release. He sends the local Member of Parliament to investigate. She weighs six stone, can hardly stand, and obviously can’t care for herself, but she’s still defiant. She writes to the Department of Health complaining that she doesn’t get enough vegetables. They investigate the food situation at the nursing home and are more than satisfied. But she gets an abundance of vegetables from then on. She decides to stay and does, for another thirteen years.

  I visit her one day about a year before she dies. I’m bored, the day is hot and I’m trying not to look at my watch. She’s shuffling through old photos. I pick up a portrait of her grandparents, her mother’s parents. Her grandfather, that Soldier of the Empire, veteran of the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the Maori Wars, is standing straight, a gold Albert chain looped across his chest. His long-suffering wife is seated, composed, her face as yet untouched by cancer. I comment that he seems to have been a fine upstanding man. He was nothing of the sort, she says and tells me matter-of-factly how, when she was four, and a number of times after that, he looked carefully around to make sure no adult was watching, took her by the hand and led her away …

  For forty or fifty years she’s been telling doctors and psychiatrists of the tragedies of her life, her other grandfather struck by lightning, her dead sister, her early and disastrous marriage, the reasons why she is as she is, but she’s never mentioned this. Now she passes it over to me in an aside, as if it were just one more of the old photos she’s handling, or an interesting clipping from the Daily Examiner. She goes on shuffling the photos.

  The honeycomb

  I complete my BA degree while teaching high school and looking after three children who, during this time, become teenagers. Only the night hours, after they finish their homework, belong to me. Here all petty and mundane difficulties disappear as I enter the world of the midnight scholar. Reference books, sacred tomes full of exciting and fabulous ideas, are spread out around me. I absorb them, possess them, and use them as the building blocks for essays into which I pour all of my own thoughts and feelings. Five years of my middle age stream out behind me as, in the midnight hours, I traverse new territories, undertake new adventures and, at the end of my first degree, begin the most exciting adventure of all. I’m awarded a number of prizes and scholarships, but all with strings attached, all dependent on my going into residence to do an honours year, something which can’t be done externally. It’s all or nothing.

  This will be difficult, but the professor of English persuades the principal of one of the women’s colleges to offer me a place as a college tutor. As a college flat goes with the tutorship, they decide that my daughter, now fourteen, can come as well: my older children are, at this time, at university and teachers college respectively. From now until my retirement I’ll inhabit two worlds, a foot in each, moving between the mellow cloisters of the university, the silent carpeted library, my own cell in the honeycomb of learning, and the steamy sauna on the coast, the stew of family emotions centred on my mother. I soon become adept at separating the two and almost change personality as I descend or ascend the ranges.

  My husband supports my decision to go into residence and we agree on a plan to alternate weekends together, in one place or the other. For us this works well, right up to his retirement some six years later, and he will often, but not always, enjoy the new world as much as I do. Only the Presbyterian minister at Grafton, forgetting the parable of the talents, disapproves. During the Sunday service, the week before I leave, he actually asks the congregation to join him in praying for the welfare of my children in what he speaks of as the difficult times ahead of them. This pronouncement marks my definitive break with organised religion: from now on I’ll pursue a more solitary path.

  Meanwhile, at the end of this year I’ll be awarded the university medal and a scholarship to do a PhD. This will be the first doctorate from my university on a literary subject, a study of Judith Wright’s poetry, and one of very few, at the time, on Australian literature. It seems that, at this time, I’m unstoppable; a combination of being in the right place at the right time and working like one obsessed (which I am). This is as good as it gets. I snatch the last available lectureship — in Australian literature — just before t
he economic ice-age descends upon Australian universities. Like my father before me I score the winning try just before the full-time whistle.

  The university will always be for me a hallowed place, a place of immense privilege. The dimly lit cloisters, the ivy-covered walls, turrets and wisteria walks of Booloominbah beguile my soul. I’m in love with the ideal of the university, its many dedicated teachers and students and, above all, the whole ambience of scholarship and learning. However, even in this most civilised and ritualised of places, vestiges of the rainforest remain. Competition is corrosive and, with intelligent people involved, all with a sense of mission, all with a high stake in defending the ideologies on which their careers depend, conflict becomes passionate and intense. Some have been known to suicide following personal disappointment, perhaps an attack in a faculty meeting or a defeat for a chair, while vilification and even physical attack are not unknown. A university is surely the place for individuality and difference, but it’s also the place where rampant egos flourish, each playing out his or her own highly personalised drama.

  I get an inkling of this, the politics of power as distinct from the scholarship of the university, during my honours year. The radical changes of the sixties and seventies, including the sexual revolution, have not yet penetrated the college in which I’m a tutor. Ceremony and regulations, both more appropriate to women’s colleges in the old world than the new, to the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century, are all-important. The head of college, a former officer in the Australian Women’s Services, sits at high table flanked by the college tutors. She looks down upon the throng of students who, perhaps sullenly, sing the academic hymn ‘Gaudeamus igatur’ as she proceeds, with a flutter of her academic gown, from the high table to the fastness of the senior common room. She’s of the control-yourself take-a-cold-shower persuasion, and little realises the hostility of the young women who are, notionally at least, in her care. Their hostility proceeds from, among other things, her action the previous year when she expelled a student from college, literally put her out on the street with nowhere else to go, for having a male student in her room.

  A similar punitive act which occurs during the year of my residence intensifies the hostility. A student becomes pregnant and decides to continue her studies rather than simply disappear on a so-called holiday. She’s banished to the far reaches of the residential accommodation, a wooden building two hundred yards away, from where she has to walk to and from the dining hall three times a day, beginning at 7.30 am, and often in icy weather. Her billowing perambulations are viewed by the head with a mixture of disgust at her condition and satisfaction at the punishment she’s devised. I’m reminded of this head of college years later when, in Debreçen, Hungary, I see a female commissar bundle a middle-aged woman off a tram into the icy street simply for fainting, for dropping like a stone from her seat to the floor of the tram. The woman was, I understand, exhausted from overwork. The principle — punish the unfortunate — is the same.

  Heads of colleges and heads of departments have at this time immense power, for the hierarchical structures and medieval traditions of old-world universities have been transplanted, unchanged, to Australia. These traditions don’t always sit well among the gum trees. The academic procession at graduation is but one example of this. The spectacular parade of scholars in their brilliant and colourful plumage, in academic robes from universities all over the world, is preceded by someone called the Yeoman Bedell. His function and the meaning of his grandiose title are lost in the mists of the past but, beneath his medieval fancy dress, he’s the head of university security.

  Courses and degrees duplicate those of the old world as if ordained by God, and at this time most of the staff have been recruited from either Oxford or Cambridge. Many consider themselves to be in exile at the very edge of the known world and some are said to have almost fainted as the plane circled Armidale and they got their first glimpse of Booloominbah among the gum-trees. Lecturers are at this time considered to be scholars and gentlemen (women usually fill the less demanding position of tutor). It is assumed that their leisure time, lots of it, is devoted to research and publication, and study leave is usually spent in English institutions. Many of the very best students proceed to postgraduate studies at either Oxford or Cambridge, and so perpetuate the central tradition. I soon notice that Australian studies are relegated to the margins and often denigrated as second-class scholarship. A famous put-down is that of one professor of English elsewhere who, when asked why he didn’t include any Australian literature in his courses, responded with the taunting enquiry — Is there any?

  When I arrive Australian literature comprises half of a one-year course, shared with American literature. My choice of an Australian topic for my PhD is considered wantonly self-destructive. The professor warns me, with genuine concern, that such a provincial qualification will never win me an academic position. Yet, by the time I finish my thesis, the only available lectureship is in Australian literature, so central has it become. Meanwhile the Association for the Study of Australian Literature has been formed and courses in Australian literature have begun to flourish in Europe as well as Australia.

  Then, before I retire, I will see the gradual attrition of these courses, replaced by the more specialised colonial literatures, indigenous literature or women’s literature, with study leave often spent in exotic places such as Spain, Canada or Trinidad rather than Oxford or Cambridge. In these latter days literature will no longer be studied as art in the same way as a painting — its composition, colour, balance and detail — would be studied, but rather as the expression of social and political realities, or the illustration of a theoretical perspective. Perhaps this is as it should be, but it seems to me that knowledge is not, as I once thought, a stable entity. It too reflects the evolutionary demands of a rainforest culture: those of hierarchy, of precedence, of a struggle for the light.

  But all this is in the future as I begin my third life.

  In my first life I was a fearful and stressed-out child and adolescent with, according to my father, the amber liquid too close to my eyes. He was probably right.

  My second was as a farmer’s wife working beside my husband, firstly on a soldier settler’s block in the Burdekin Delta, sharing his determination to succeed, and then on a wonderful farm beside (sometimes beneath) the Big River of my ancestors.

  In my third life I’m in clover. A life of study, writing and teaching, it’s the most exciting adventure of all.

  I RETURN NOW to Bangalow, a heritage village in the hinterland behind Byron Bay. This is my heart’s lost land, full of the ghosts of memories, the memories of ghosts. It was here in 1925 that my mother, a pregnant teenager, went to her marriage in a grey dress.

  Mesmerised by the family drama I come here often, obsessed with the past. I usually turn east down Byron Street between the art galleries, real estate agencies and gourmet restaurants that now line its heritage precincts. I contemplate, once again, the old Church of England where my parents were married, as if the bricks themselves could tell me more about their story.

  At the top of Byron Street a large roundabout has been superimposed, like an ugly concrete cap, on an ancient crossroads. From the beginning of time, crossroads have been symbolic places of choice; also, because of the cross, of sacrifice. Suicides were buried at the crossroads and murderers strung up on gibbets there, for both were seen to have made criminal choices.

  These particular crossroads are older than the first white settlement, and the roundabout cannot erase their centuries of passing, of crisscrossing, of the pursuit of desire. They were first carved out from the rainforest by the restless journeying of the Bundjalung, the Aboriginal people of this area. Later the bullock tracks of the cedar-getters etched them deeper and deeper into the red soil. Then came the drays of the first settlers, then the first cars and buses and, later, the frenetic traffic of the century’s end. In these last days desire takes the form of constant movement, constant change. A
steady stream of traffic sweeps around the circle and spins off, as if by centrifugal force, in any one of three directions (the fourth is a cul-de-sac).

  In the summer of 1997 the roundabout is the scene of an astonishing coincidence. I sweep down from the mountains after a four-hour drive, and pause at the roundabout at the very instant that my eldest son surges around it at the end of his long journey from Sydney and the south. Though we’ve each come a long, long way and from different directions, not a heartbeat separates our arrival at the crossroads. Something synchronises our meeting at this precise spot at this precise instant.

  Is it mere coincidence or is it a demonstration of the mysterious and invisible lines of memory and desire which, for me, intersect here? And there’s a further symmetry, for I have his teenage daughter with me, he has his brother’s daughter. My grand-daughters are both the same age, the age of my mother when she first met my father and married him here. They smile a lot. No-one would dare tell them, even in jest, that the juice is too close to their eyes. No-one will need to. Their lives will be quite different.

  And so, this time, I ignore the downward path to the past, spin into the roundabout behind my son and, all together, we take the upward way. We pass the old Bangalow cemetery high on the hill and leave behind us the old, old settlements of Tintenbar and Newrybar. The scarlet fingers of the coral trees flourish against the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky and the drystone walls of the pioneers meander around the hillsides, dividing and portioning out the land. We come down into the Bay as dusk falls and the great light begins its sweeping arcs, steady as a heartbeat, radiant as Home.

  Besides my own memories and the stories of my family, I have consulted, referred to or quoted from the following (arranged in order of first mention):

  1਀਀The Clover Chain