Roundabout at Bangalow Page 4
There are stories too of the more immediate past: of coming as a young and gently reared bride to the Keerrong valley, then clothed to the tops of the hills with the impenetrable rainforest; of carrying the washtub down to the creek each afternoon to wash the clothes in the sweet water beneath the wild cherry trees; of being accosted by wandering Aborigines and disarming them with gifts of food while her little children hid under the bed; or of the terrible day in 1914 when her husband lay dead and her youngest child was not yet born. These stories, true or half-true, are myths of their origins for the listening children, marking them out as special, particular, set apart from the ordinary people of the race. Fifteen years ago, in Ireland, I was able to verify the connection with the Gore-Booths, but the descent is from the Dean of Londonderry not the Bishop — such inflation is typical of family stories.
This house is always busy with the coming and going of family and neighbours; it is redolent with the smells of cooking and alive with contending emotions, for life here is lived at a passionate level of affection, gossip, recrimination, indignation and reconciliation. The peach trees come right up to the kitchen window and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine fills the air. The possums play in the peach trees and come into the roof at night, peeing down through the ceiling. Huntsman spiders scuttle on the ceiling at night, or hide behind the amateurish oil paintings of Highland cattle or flamingoes standing in lily ponds, the relics of the genteel pursuits of long-dead great-aunts. The children are safe, though, beneath the snowy mosquito nets. By day they sit on the bench below the casement windows and listen in on the latest family drama. They can see for miles down through a paddock that is halfway between rainforest and pasture. This is the graveyard of the rainforest, caught at a stage between that primal Eden and the featureless pastures of the dairy farms around. The stumps, some of them six foot high, now stand in the harsh glare of midsummer, some colonised by strangler figs and passion vines. Inkberries and cape gooseberries flourish along with stinging nettles and Paterson’s curse, lush green grass and arrogant weeds. Aunty Millie cries Sookie, Sookie, Sookie and bangs the bucket and the jersey cow runs to be milked. Granny puts out a saucer of milk for the black snake. Uncle Walter lies in wait, seizes it by the tail when it comes to drink and cracks its head on the tank stand. The children greedily eat peach pie swamped in yellow cream, or steal biscuits from the biscuit tin with the Rosella parrot on the side behind the kitchen door.
A young man comes up on a tall chestnut horse and ties it to the garden rail where it stamps and sweats and flicks the flies away. This is Uncle Bob, a veteran of the Light Horse who has been to Egypt, taken part in the cavalry charge on the Wells of Beersheba, has ridden into Jerusalem behind the victorious General Allenby and walked down the Street Called Straight in Damascus, arrogant in his slouch hat with its emu feathers. He is full of stories of adventure, untainted by the horror of the trenches, for he remained in Egypt when many were shipped off to France, leaving behind their whalers, their prized horses born and bred on the farms of New South Wales. His worst moment, he tells me, was when a camel stamped on his foot. He is his mother’s eldest son, her darling, and spends many an hour on her verandah. He is a tick dodger, a tick inspector, one of an army of returned soldiers, most of them from the Light Horse, employed to wipe out the cattle ticks that are infiltrating the district. This is done by a program of rounding up the herds and swimming them through arsenic dips. It’s easy and pleasant work and few believe the scurrilous rumour that the tickies carry matchboxes full of live ticks to re-infest any herd which seems about to be declared clean.
This then is the House of Bliss. In this place a child wakes each morning with a glad heart. The magpies and butcher birds greet the day with their holy descants. The dew hangs on fences, garden flowers and weeds alike, and each spoke of the spider webs is hung with diamonds which reflect the light. A rickety spider clings in the centre of her web, bearing the cross of St Andrew effortlessly on her back. The child goes to the washstand on the back verandah and pours water from a china jug into a china dish; many decades later she sees the same thing done by a priest in the great cathedral of Santiago. Jug and dish are patterned with full-blown roses, and the soap is Cashmere Bouquet. To the child the perfume of this soap is as frankincense and myrrh. The water is icy-cold and full of wrigglers from the tank; someone has forgotten to pour kerosene on top of the water. She dips her hands gingerly in the water and carefully baptises her face, two eyes, nose and mouth only, and goes in to face the day. She sits on the kitchen stool leaning on her elbow, one hand languidly supporting her head and gazes adoringly at her Granny across the breakfast table, for she loves her more than anyone on earth. This is the old lady of the garden, the storyteller who carries down through time not only the blood-lines but the family stories, the folklore, the medicinal balm, the wisdom of garden and kitchen, the great burden of unreserved love that only a Granny can give. This is the Great Mother herself, never again to be seen so clearly.
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At this point I must admit that my childhood was not simply a progression of flower shows, Sunday school picnics and coconut ice; indeed, in retrospect, I can see how shadowed it was. I am told that a chicken is genetically programmed to recognise the dark shadow which sweeps overhead as that of the hawk, without knowing that it is a hawk, or even what a hawk is. The child too, in a home such as ours, is programmed to be prescient, to wait for the shadow that dominates the house without, at this stage, understanding its nature.
Perhaps anxiety is genetic, absorbed through the umbilical cord, a steady drip seeping into the bloodstream of the developing child. Consider the anxiety of a pregnant girl abandoned on the railway station and even perhaps shoved towards the steel wheels of the locomotive; could this not predispose the child to a similar state of anxiety? Perhaps even (here I become more fanciful) this is a generational thing, a matter of communication through what James Joyce called the daisy-chain of umbilical cords, the anxiety and obsessiveness of each female generation seeping through like a drip, permeating each developing embryo. A clover chain would be more appropriate in our part of the world, where a child could sit comfortably in the pasture and string together the musky cream clover flowers, and try to make a chain long enough to reach to the end of the world, while the green and shadowy rainforest inches closer. What is certain is that such a child sits in no-man’s land, looking anxiously from one parent to the other, hoping desperately for a quiet day or a calm night. Yet I knew, even then, that all houses were not like this; that there were homes where a deep and loving calm enveloped all. I do not know what it is to be lovingly held, and I long for attention. When a child at school tells me of the kindness of the nurses when she had her appendix out, I pray for a long time for that to happen to me, and daydream about the loving words and caresses that might come my way if I were ever lucky enough to have what was spoken of then, with great gravity, as an operation.
When I am eight years old my father becomes even more restless and discontented. He is earning below the basic wage and takes for granted the fringe benefits — home-ownership, his family so close by and so gregarious, the free meat, fruit and vegetables. Here, though he doesn’t realise it, we are in clover. A message comes from a friend who works in the meatworks at Wallangarra. He has secured a place for Dad, at six pounds a week. This figure — six pounds a week — reverberates through the household, in discussion by day and in torrid night-time arguments. Our mother doesn’t want to go, and she at least has done her sums. Despite her opposition the expulsion is effected with unbelievable speed and we leave our rainforest Eden for a barren landscape of grey and tattered gum trees, rabbit burrows and eroded gullies — all for six pounds a week. Our Uncle Tom, just back from New Guinea, arrives to take over Dad’s job. Dad goes immediately to Wallangarra, full of optimism, and we follow, in a furniture truck with the dogs and chooks in the back and a white tarpaulin over the top. We are now on the road and our wanderings over the next three years take us to m
eatworks at Wallangarra, Byron Bay and South Grafton in quick succession.
TO ACCOUNT for the shadow that hangs over my childhood I need to go much further back than my own first glimpse of the world. The shadow is almost certainly genetic; something which has come down from the twilight of the Druids and seeks out one or two in each generation of my and other Celtic families. It can emerge in all sorts of ways, from habitual discontent to a sense of cosmic injustice: the feeling that people are just helpless victims of fate. This is what my father means when he says ironically I always was lucky. Thomas Hardy considered this world a blighted star and my father called it, more than once, a barstid of a place. He was convinced that bad luck and injustice dogged every step of his life and he might have been right.
Whether his troubles were of his own making or whether they were genetic is debatable, but he certainly had his share of what might be called adverse life events. Exploring a genetic link to depression psychiatrists have found that, just as depression runs in families, so do adverse life events:
Bad luck runs in families because it’s in your genes … You can stop blaming your stars or that mirror you broke. If everything you do is dogged by misfortune you’ve probably inherited a tendency to mess up your life.
Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1998, p.41.
This suggests that my parents, constituted as they were, had no choice in the disaster that was their marriage. Their story begins when they met over the post office counter in the general store at Billinudgel and fell headlong into love.
Location is important; all my North Coast places are spectacularly beautiful — the cradle, one would think, of tranquil thoughts and loving deeds. Unfortunately this doesn’t always follow. My parents met at Christmas 1924 in the village of Billinudgel, a typical small stop on the North Coast railway between Casino and Murwillumbah. The railway runs along the narrow coastal shelf between the mountains and the sea, and is the lifeline for the small communities strung like beads along it. The area is defined by the spectacular semicircle of mountains, ridges and escarpment which forms the volcanic shield of Mount Warning. The volcano has been extinct for at least two million years but the traces of its activity remain in the monumental upheaval of the land into fold upon fold, ridge upon ridge of rich volcanic soil. The buttresses of the ancient volcano reach down like the ribs of a fan from the apex, the volcanic complex centred on Mt Warning. The fan opens wide to the sea at Ballina, Byron Bay, Brunswick Heads and Tweed Heads. These buttresses were once richly clothed with the subtropical jungle known to the cedar-getters as the Big Scrub. This is a magical landscape even today, but in its primeval state, before Captain Cook first sighted and named Mt Warning, or the first white foot stepped into its green and fantastic gloom, it would have resembled a scene from Jurassic Park with its groves of bangalow palms, its impenetrable thickets of stinging tree and lawyer vine, and its under-layer of tree fern and cunjevoi.
The European history of the area goes back to the times when the cedar logs were hauled by bullock teams to the edge of the bluffs at sites still known as Cooper’s Shoot, Skinner’s Shoot and Possum’s Shoot. The raw logs were sent spinning down the shoots to the narrow coastal shelf where other bullock teams hauled them out into the surf to be loaded onto schooners waiting in the bay. We are not told how many were crushed by a ricocheting log, or how many drowned in the surf in what seems to have been a desperate enterprise for both men and bullocks. At the time of my story the Big Scrub is still being felled to make way for pastures of paspalum and clover. My mother’s snapshots show friends and relatives posed against chest-high stumps in paddocks that best resemble the churned-up battlefields of the Somme. This is called clearing, as though it’s a virtuous pursuit, a cleansing of riotous and uncontrolled nature. The basis is being laid for future battles between developers and the claims of conservation.
If the apex of the volcanic shield is Mt Warning, the focal point is Cape Byron, the most easterly point of the Australian mainland. On it stands the lighthouse, solid, dazzling and pure, the eye of this world. The light at Byron Bay presides over my story. It can illuminate and warn, but is powerless to prevent the actions of any, let alone those with whom I’m concerned. A minor and fixed light shines steadfastly out to sea, visible only from certain dangerous shoals. The main light does a complete revolution, flashing intermittently from dusk to dawn. Its arc fingers the distant volcanic folds running down to the sea, the cliffs and waterfalls, the clusters of bangalow palms and the remnant patches of rainforest back to Goonengerry and the Whian Whian State Forest. It briefly lights up the exposed cowbails where a family is finishing the last of the milking. Its arc takes in villages with historic names such as Eureka and Federal, and more evocative titles such as Jerusalem Creek, Emigrant Creek and Repentance Creek. Others like Tintenbar and Newrybar are derived from Aboriginal place-names, although the Aboriginal race is at this time banished from both the rainforest and the farms. Billinudgel itself was once the Aboriginal place of the king parrots.
At the time I speak of, Christmas 1924, Billinudgel is like a small American frontier town. Its one street, overhung with the verandahs of the general store and butcher’s shop, terminates on the corner close to the railway station, where the two-storey timber pub, the New Brighton Hotel, later to be known as Ma Ring’s, is clamorous with male drunkenness, mateship and good humour. The general store is large and rambling, with pressed-tin ceilings and walls. It’s the third building on the site, for fires, like floods, are depressingly frequent at Billinudgel. It stocks all manner of groceries, newspapers, farm tools, seeds, patent medicines, dress patterns and materials, riding boots, canvas shoes, children’s toys — whatever you need is likely to be found somewhere on a dusty shelf behind the polished cedar counters. In this it’s typical of many a country store at the time. One corner at the front is portioned off as the Billinudgel post office, with a switchboard for the local party line, and a counter from which a young woman sells stamps, dispenses pensions and accepts parcels and mail. These are dispatched on the railway, the universal highway for the carriage of goods and mail, for family visits and outings, and for the letters and journeyings of young lovers.
I try to imagine my parents as they are when they first meet. I know they are both Australians of at least five generations’ standing. The ancestry that fans out behind them includes convicts, a soldier of the Empire, a cedar-cutter, a gold-miner, a Scottish poet and lay preacher, several Irish girls come from Tipperary to the colony to find husbands, an Irish rebel transported for insurrection (lucky not to have been hanged), and an upright Orangeman from the north. In a sense the history of the colony, with all its faults and triumphs, runs through their veins.
They have no crisis of identity, for that’s a term invented much later. They are absolutely sure of what it means to be an Australian. They never, ever, refer to England or Ireland or Scotland as Home, for they are completely at home in Australia, in its farmlands, rainforests and beaches. Although, after nearly a century and a half of settlement the rainforest has been almost completely conquered, it never occurs to them that its timber might be cut out or the forest gone forever. Their reading tastes are typical of their time: they read the Bulletin and its female equivalent the Woman’s Mirror, Smith’s Weekly for fun and the Truth for salacious divorces, which cause them great merriment, and one thing they share to the end is a quirky and ribald sense of humour. But these young people about to converge on the post office counter do proceed from different backgrounds, and where they come from is important.
Eileen Alannah
I try to imagine my mother’s childhood from the stories she has told me and from my memories of her personality. She is Eileen Alannah, or this is what her father calls her when he bounces her on his knee or swings her up onto his shoulder and sings the old Irish lament ‘Eileen Alannah, Eileen Asthore’. He tells her that Alannah means sweetheart in Irish, and she is his sweetheart. She is the eldest of four girls (a fifth arrives much later) born to a
blacksmith at Ulmarra on the Clarence River and his wife, who has been a pupil teacher at Lower Southgate. This child is small, dark and determined. She oscillates between her mother’s kitchen, heavy with the smells of milk and porridge, busy and crowded with her little sisters, and her father’s world, the smithy across the paddock. Here the father, dark, slight and resentful, plucks the horseshoes from the coals with his long-handled tongs, hammers them on the forge with sparks flying, then plunges them, with a satisfying hiss of steam, into the water barrel. This is the Grandfather who later visits us at The Channon, who works on the roads there for the relief, and teaches us to sing of the old rock candy mountains, Where they never change their socks.
This is a male world, exciting but treacherous. Here the racehorses, hacks and Clydesdales from the surrounding farms are tethered, waiting to be shod, and the talk is all of horses, gambling and male politics. It’s a closed world, mysterious and stirring, and behind it is the Catholicism which links the blacksmith to the men who bring their horses here. Their names — Carlton, Doherty, McMahon, O’Connell — are like a roll-call at mass. There is a close bond between this father and his eldest daughter but, at the same time, a streak of resentment which causes him to cast her off from time to time, to send her howling back across the paddock beneath the jacaranda trees, hopping from one foot to the other between the cowpats and scotch thistles, back from the mysteries of fire and iron to the milk-and-water world of the mother. She is a wayward girl, obstinate, dark and closed-in, her only confidante her sister who is one year younger.