Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  On the surface the war is regarded with laconic stoicism, even humour. Smith’s Weekly runs a sanitised comic strip where Diggers fight Jerries, go on leave to Blighty, and dodge shells which scoot harmlessly overhead and fizzle out in the mud. The worst thing that happens to these Diggers is a harmless practical joke played on them by their mates. On the other hand there are ugly rumours, whispered stories of the most horrific kind. One concerns a Digger so badly burned by mustard gas that his skin has flayed off, and he is kept alive in a liquid bath in the Veterans’ Hospital in Sydney. Another concerns soldiers with VD who are quietly put to death in India on the way back from the war lest they infect their virtuous wives on their return, for the whole society is obsessed with eugenics and hygienic reproduction. Later I read All Quiet on the Western Front and return as often as possible to Bean’s History of the Great War which gives me the most terrifying nightmares.

  When I am an adult I learn that the anniversary of the first Battle of the Somme falls on my birthday and wonder whether I was there, whether I am in fact a reincarnated soldier or nurse; only this, it seems to me, could explain my obsession. This is reinforced when I learn that, according to Buddhism, reincarnation takes place exactly eleven years after death, that would be from 2 July 1916 to the same date in 1927. I toy with the thought of a regression under hypnotherapy, but finally decide that, as an obviously morbid depressive, I’ve simply mopped up, during my childhood, the communal horror.

  Meanwhile at school the teacher is wise enough to leave me alone to progress at my own pace. There is a reader for each year, red beginning with The fat cat sat on the mat, then blue, then green, then brown. I race through them all with triumphant flourishes, and show off considerably. In first class I sit beside a child who dribbles, blinks and stares at the ceiling. Her younger brother, several classes ahead of her, is required to mop up her spilled yellow liquid, to the titters of the other children. I begin on the red reader, master it quickly and learn to do the first class sums. I am promoted halfway through the year to second class and so on, so that I enter fifth class at the age of eight, something that could never happen in a larger school. There are wonderful treasures to be discovered and consumed. One cupboard holds sets of supplementary readers which transport me to other worlds: those of David Copperfield, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Dot and the Kangaroo and Blinky Bill.

  The School Magazine arrives once a month with a flurry of excitement. To our amazement a big wooden box of books arrives one day from a central library and we are allowed to choose, to borrow, to exchange. My sister and I bear these library books home in excitement and read them over and over, interspersed with comics, not only Ginger Meggs annuals, but imported comics which tell of mad foreign rituals such as Pancake Day, Bank Holidays and trips to Brighton. We are insatiable readers, lapping up tales of mystery and imagination under the bedclothes with torches at night. Later, heads buried in books on trains, planes and automobiles, we ignore the real world as it goes spinning by.

  The school mornings are given over to sums, writing and reading; the hot and dusty afternoons to pleasure. The teacher brings his violin and we learn such nostalgic songs as ‘The Minstrel Boy’, all quite inappropriate to the children of the valley. Thomas Moore is popular for he mirrors the sentimentality of the age. The high voices of the children and the reedy tones of the violin fill the room and spill out into the afternoon air. No doubt the words — The minstrel boy to the war has gone, In the ranks of death you’ll find him — have a certain resonance for the teacher, if not for the children. In summer he takes us swimming in Terania Creek. He leads the way in his black cover-up swimmers. He is skinny and emaciated, with knobbly white knees and other interesting knobbles elsewhere. We slip and slide down the red clay of the creek bank between the stinging smartweed; beneath the wild cherries we step gingerly over sharp pebbles into the shallow water. Bullrouts lurk in the weeds; the agony of their sting, it is said, lasts until sundown. The teacher takes us, one by one, out into the deep water. We hold onto his feet while he takes us for a swim, then struggle, hot and stinging, back up the steep bank to the school. None of us actually learns to swim but the sensations remain: the dank smell of the river-bank under the rainforest trees, the peaty water sliding over its rocky bed and combing through the languid water-weeds where the bullrouts lurk, the cold and bony feet of the teacher in my desperate grasp, and the sharp contrast between the cool water and the hot stinging air of summer.

  The playground is a miniature world of ritual and precedence. Each game has its season, and no-one knows how this is decided. As if by instinct, like migratory birds, the group raises its head, sniffs an imperceptible change in the air, and collectively knows that it is time for hopscotch, skipping, jacks or yo-yos. Many of the games are hand-me-downs from a remote English past. In ‘Oranges and Lemons’ for instance the children chant a litany of London churches:

  Oranges and lemons

  Say the bells of St Clements

  When will you pay me?

  Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  The game ends with a beheading — the last man’s head chop, chop, chop, off — which refers, I suppose, to the Tower of London. There are other rituals, peculiar to the world of the children and unknown or ignored by adults: a shed horseshoe must be spat upon and tossed over the left shoulder (eyes shut) as a wish is made; see a piebald horse, cross the fingers and make a wish, but never divulge the wish; sit in the warm clover, look for four-leaf clover leaves and dry them between the pages of an autograph book (every little girl has one); or blow away the winged seeds of the dandelions and make a wish. We call the dandelions pee-the-beds; if you pick them you’ll wet the bed that night. Good luck is constantly besought, and imploring wishes are flung after discarded horseshoes, piebald horses, the four-leaf aberrations in the clover patch and the feathered seeds of pee-the-beds. Are these games and rituals handed down in the world of childhood from the First Fleet, or are they perhaps, through long usage, patterned into the child’s psyche? Meanwhile sides are picked for rounders or cricket and I am always picked last, for I can’t catch a ball. Sometimes war is waged, through the rainforest and lantana beside the school, with bows and arrows, spears made from the long dry stems of a plant called Stinking Roger, and sometimes sticks and stones. My mother teaches me a rhyme to keep playground bullies at bay: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me. This causes great merriment and I am bullied all the more. My career as a cry-baby, a misfit, is well and truly on the way.

  One afternoon a week we sew with the teacher’s wife while the boys do woodwork. We make needle cases, hem handkerchiefs and eventually progress to a pillow case. The cotton is usually black from our sweaty hands and stiff with spit from the number of times we lick it to thread the needle. Everything we take home has to be boiled up in the copper to make it useable. I am eventually allowed to make a proper doll’s dress, with finished off seams, with buttons and button-holes, but it isn’t nearly as exciting as the glamorous, botched together creations I make at home. I am at this time sewing for my doll, from a scrap of sequined apricot silk stolen from an uncle’s suitcase (probably a souvenir of some romantic conquest), a replica of the wedding dress worn by Princess Marina of Greece for her marriage to Prince George of Kent.

  We are intensely interested in royalty. This is fostered by an article in the School Magazine on the royal family — King George V, Queen Mary and their numerous children from the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales down to the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester (later to be governor-general of Australia). There are also reverent articles in the magazines that come into the house — the Woman’s Mirror, the Home Journal, and later the new and exciting Women’s Weekly with its comic strip featuring Mandrake the Magician, his Nubian slave Lothar, and his girlfriend Princess Narda. Meanwhile we particularly love the little princesses, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, and send away for a cardboard cutout of their miniature thatched cottage in Kensington Gardens and carefully asse
mble it. These are not faraway strangers; though we children are sixth generation Australians they are our personal King, Queen and Princesses. When the Northern Star announces that King George V is dying, and suggests that his subjects pray for him, I am profoundly affected. I go out to the side of the house among the daisies where the dogs, Barney and Caesar, usually bed down. I kneel on the hard ground and pray to God, deeply and passionately, for my King’s recovery, and I am personally affronted when he dies in spite of all my efforts.

  The Depression has hardly touched this village, mainly because food is so plentiful — fresh milk and eggs, vegetables and fruit, homemade butter. There are people who are very well off, including the owner of the butcher’s shop where my father works. He owns a saloon car with velour upholstery and velvet tassels at the side for the passengers to hold onto, quite a contrast to the Model T Fords and old lorries which usually rattle around the roads. The owner of the general store is also well off. He owns the only wireless, so the men go there to hear the test cricket broadcast from England. Economy is a way of life for everyone, not just the poor. There is no soap powder; rough soap is cut up into flakes to boil up with the clothes in the copper, and the copper stand is a forty-four-gallon drum with a hole cut in the side for the fire to be laid. Sugar bags are boiled until soft and hemmed to make bath mats. Flour bags are boiled in attempts to remove the brand, opened out and used to make bloomers. Many a little girl is branded across the backside with Fielders Flour. Gibson’s Gift Tea labels are collected and traded for crockery, and bush furniture is constructed from kerosene cases. These cases are built of the finest white pine to contain two four-gallon tins of kerosene. The empty cases are stacked upon each other to the desired height, fastened together, then covered with cretonne. They are functional, look good, and cost next to nothing.

  We do have some people from the outside world to remind us of the Depression. Our mother’s parents, hard-hit, come to stay. Grandfather has been a blacksmith at Goolmangar and Bangalow. Now over fifty, he breaks stones on the road for the relief, the equivalent of work-for-dole today. He works in the vegetable garden and teaches us to sing: In the Old Rock-Candy Mountains, Where they never change their socks. Grandma teaches us our prayers — Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child — and to say Grace. She is a health fanatic and we gag on her medications: codliver oil to prevent colds, sulphur and treacle every Saturday to cleanse the blood, and a mighty dose of castor oil periodically to clear out our systems.

  Both our grandmothers are very religious, as many women were in those days. I realise now that it was up to them to carry the faith forward against the misbehaviour that was rife in the male population. In an attempt to forestall this, male children were taken to the Temperance Union by their mothers at fourteen to sign the Pledge … never to allow alcohol to pass their lips (I still have my father’s certificate). Women like my Grandma, my mother’s mother, are seekers after eternal truth. They long for some poetry in their lives, for some great and glorious salvation to make up for the sordid reality of this world. She began as a Presbyterian (hence our religion) but eventually found a haven with the Christadelphians, who believe that only one hundred and forty-four thousand, the number given in The Revelation of St John the Divine, will be saved on the last day, and all of them Christadelphians. Apocalyptic movements flourish in the Depression and their tracts, adorned with those terrifying figures, the Beast of Revelation and the Whore of Babylon, supposed to bring war and pestilence to the world in its dying days, are everywhere. Grandma’s certainty of salvation, and her attempts to bring him to his religious crossroads, are the subject of Grandfather’s derision.

  He is an apostate from two faiths, Catholicism and Methodism, and is now a free thinker. His family history has been one of continual religious turmoil. In a sense his family are the equivalent of swinging voters. They turn from one side to another, not in any search for truth but more often through marriages where love or desire has overcome religious conviction. His mother, originally Methodist, has turned to marry a fascinating young Irishman, Michael Browne, to the indignation of her family. When Michael is struck by lightning just before her third child is born, literally blown out of his boots while ploughing the farm, she turns back to the Methodism of her family. Grandfather grows up between the two competing faiths, looking at first eagerly, then cynically, from one to the other. There is the faith of his uncles who own the pub at Ulmarra, who breed fine racehorses and win the Grafton cup more than once, go to mass, drink and gamble. These people are immensely attractive. Then there is the straitlaced faith of his mother, a reclusive martinet who takes in sewing to support her children. Grandfather is small and dark and Irish; he knows who he is. His sardonic commentary on the turn-the-other-cheek goodwill of the brethren is continuous. He drinks when he feels like it, bets on the horses and is almost a stranger in his own family. The atmosphere is tense and they soon depart to run a boarding house at Murwillumbah.

  Our Granny (our father’s mother) is also religious, but she is a passionate Anglican, a whole-hearted supporter of the Establishment. She endows the church with a cedar pulpit, buys an organ so her daughter can learn to play hymns at home, and puts up the Bishop when he comes to preach. She is also very comfortably off. She owns a large farm but lives in a small house on one corner of it and rents out the rest, including the eight-bedroom federation house that her Irish husband had built just before his death. The small house is called The Chalet and the large one, predictably, is Donegal. Both houses, five miles away from us and surrounded by beautiful gardens, are the centre of the family’s social life and gossip. Granny is also a member of one of the old established families of the district. She tells us proudly and often that she is the daughter of Robert Scott Wotherspoon, for many years Mayor of Lismore, and the grand-daughter of an early Australian teacher and poet, Andrew Wotherspoon. A Scottish migrant, a Master of Arts from the University of Glasgow and a friend of John Dunmore Lang, he was the first schoolmaster in Canberra (then Captain’s Flat) and the second in Lismore, and was well known in both places as a fiery and quarrelsome lay preacher. His public arguments on matters of church doctrine with Campbell of Duntroon, the biggest landowner in the Molon-glo District, are a matter of public record. It is said that Campbell paid the fares of the family to transfer to Lismore, so anxious was he to be rid of the lot of them.

  Aged eighteen, Alice Wotherspoon goes to an Orange Lodge picnic at Clunes, and meets our Grandfather, a migrant from County Donegal and a fervent member of the Lodge, with all its bigotry. They marry; he takes up a selection at Keerrong; they have ten children in eighteen years; he then dies of a heart attack. In the past thirteen years he has, with the help of Hindu labourers, ruthlessly cleared the rainforest from more than 150 acres, and these are the rich paspalum pastures which our Granny now owns, and lets out to tenant farmers.

  Usually a sensible person, she has nevertheless absorbed from her father and husband a fierce and self-righteous intolerance. She had heard from her father an account of the Edith O’Gorman Riot in Lismore, when an escaped nun lectured the Protestants on the excesses (usually sexual) of that faith. A violent sectarian riot broke out in the street after the lecture and a number from each side were arrested and had to face the District Court in Grafton. Her father, according to our Granny, was not only acquitted, but most generously paid the fines of some of the Roman Catholics (she always gives them the full title). This made an enthralling tale for little girls held captive under the mosquito net in a high white bed with their Granny or Aunty Millie.

  The knockout though, the real tear-jerker, is from a small book called The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. This tells of a convent in Quebec where the nuns, innocent country girls, are enslaved, tortured and raped by lascivious priests, the resulting babies being strangled and thrown down a well. We have no idea how these babies come about, but thrill with horror at the dark convent circled around the well of death, the sneaking priests and the piteous little babies,
and don’t doubt the story for a moment. Years later I find a reference to this scurrilous book in Barbara Baynton’s Human Toll, look for and find it in the Mitchell Library, and realise that it really exists, that it is not simply an invention of my Granny. Other sectarians (Baynton was a Presbyterian) have read it, believed it, and have no doubt also terrified their grand-daughters with it.

  While my mother goes in for massed annuals, my Granny’s garden is a projection of her extravagant nature; a profusion of climbing roses, wisteria, plumbago, may bushes, lasiandra, honeysuckle and, most dear to me, the jasmine. This is the poet’s jasmine, originating in Arabia and Spain and grown in the South of France as the basis for the most delicate perfumes. It is common in old gardens in the colonial cities of the far North Coast of New South Wales, and now haunts the Australian night with its fragrance. A cloud of it shelters the front verandah of this house under the bullnose iron, and beneath it grow freesias and shivery grass. Our Granny is the old lady of the garden; all plants flourish for her. Cuttings pushed into the rich soil strike for her, thrive, bloom and reproduce themselves everywhere. This garden is an emblem of continuity. Grown from cuttings from her mother’s and aunts’ gardens and from those of neighbouring farms, it carries the genes of the old garden favourites down through time. The riotous garden is a paradise for children, from the old seagrass chairs under the giant jacaranda tree, to the boxes of shells under the house, collected at the beach to be glued to picture frames, or fastened around a crocheted milk-jug cover.

  This household not only exists in the present, it is continuous with the past, like a ship that sails through time with its living freight, its totem objects and its family lore. We are shown the round table, its top pit-sawn from one slab of red cedar by our Granny’s uncle Oliver Jones, a famous shipwright at Coraki (it is now in a museum). There are the bedspreads crocheted by her mother from heavy cream cotton, the patterns (for instance the ‘wheatsheaf’) centuries old, and the tinted portraits of her family behind convex glass in heavy oval frames. More important perhaps is the intangible past, the stories brought from Ireland by her husband: of an ancestor who married the daughter of the Bishop of Londonderry during the siege; from these illustrious loins (that is the Bishop’s) we are descended and must never forget it; or of the distant relationship to those heroines of the Irish resistance, Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewitz (good Protestant girls, according to our Granny, and certainly no revolutionaries).