Roundabout at Bangalow Page 8
The trains on the narrower gauge travel north through the orchards and vineyards of the granite belt to Stanthorpe, Warwick, the Darling Downs and on to Brisbane. The New South Wales trains return south through apple orchards to Tenterfield, a town of elegant and respectable Victorian facades — the post office, the courthouse, the Commonwealth Bank.
Tenterfield is the birthplace of Federation, where Henry Parkes made his inaugural Federation speech in 1889, and it was here that Banjo Paterson met and married his sweetheart in the 1890s. But Tenterfield also has links with a darker Australian legend, unknown to me at the time. It is the home of Major Thomas, the country solicitor who defended Breaker Morant at his court martial in South Africa. Thomas had his moment of fame, but returned to Tenterfield shattered by his defeat, with dark memories of the firing squad that executed his client. Now completely disillusioned with Lord Kitchener and the Empire, he sulks the remainder of his life away as the town’s most famous recluse.
We live in a rented house, a rickety weatherboard Queenslander, high on stilts so the cold westerlies blow through beneath it where the dogs have their kennel. Its backyard is bare save for the wood heap, an enormous pile of gnarled and twisted roots and stumps, a sign of what the winter will be like. The kitchen is the centre of this house, as it is of all Australian homes at this time, and the fuel stove, burnished each week with Zebra polish, is its central shrine; but we don’t get too close for the black rubs off on everything. The kitchen chairs are ranged in front of it in strict order, the favourite ones directly in front of the open firebox and oven, where feet can rest on the hob. There is a fair bit of jostling as we try to share the blast of heat while our backs freeze. Toast is made; the bread speared on the prongs of a wire toasting fork and propped in front of the firebox. No toast made in an electric toaster ever tastes as good as these smoky slices dripping with butter. The wire toasting fork has been bought from an itinerant hawker, one of those sad travellers who attempt to earn a few bob by making such things over their campfires, or by chopping wood for the housewife. They are seldom turned away empty-handed from our house or others.
On the hob is the brown pottery teapot with its knitted tea-cosy and on the mantelpiece the tea caddy with a picture of the newly completed Sydney Harbour Bridge on the side. Black tea is the opiate of the Australian working classes. It is bitter and sweet and, in my mother’s case, often accompanied by a Bex APC powder for her interminable headaches. We loll in our chairs in front of the fire, or play cards on the kitchen table with its oilcloth covering. This is patterned with koala bears, as is the matching cover on the mantelpiece, for national motifs — koalas, laughing kookaburras and above all the new Harbour Bridge — are in fashion at this time. Before we go to bed, to snuggle beneath our new satin eiderdowns, we mix up Bourneville cocoa, or Nestle’s coffee and milk, a sickly brew that has little to do with real coffee. Here in this kitchen and in these beds our lives are centred, we are safe.
Our hitherto gentle Alsatian dog, Caesar, has disgraced himself by tearing the throats out of several of the neighbour’s sheep. His days are numbered, but in the meantime he is tethered to the clothes line by a long chain which gives him the freedom of most of the backyard. A poisoned bait thrown over the fence for Caesar is eaten by Barney, our little terrier, and a rough bush remedy is applied by the local animal expert, hurriedly dragged out of the pub. A wad of tobacco is shoved hard down the dog’s throat and he is whirled round by the back legs until he brings up the bait. This grim dance of dog and dog-doctor takes place by lantern light and is watched by the horrified children who have reared the dog from a tiny pup. This is indeed a rough place.
The house fronts onto a stock route where mobs of sheep and cattle are driven by in a flurry of drovers on horseback, dogs, cracking stockwhips and dust, to the meatworks and their killing floors. Across the lane is the paddock where the sheep wait their turn. It is waterless and eaten down to bare dirt; their plaintive cries trouble us, night and day. The drovers and meatworkers are desensitised but we children are not. We mourn for the lowing cattle and the stupid sheep.
Meanwhile we go to the New South Wales school where the teacher is a sadistic caner. Some of the children whose frozen palms have been slashed with the cane for nothing more than a spelling mistake bear the purple welts for the whole of the winter and, grim little heroes, show them off along with their chilblains. We have dancing lessons at two shillings a time (three shillings for two) from the teacher’s wife in the school weathershed. The lessons are difficult for the shed is small and its boards rough, but the teacher is ambitious. She teaches National Dancing, Irish and Scottish, and the Sailors’ Hornpipe to land-bound children, most of whom have never seen the sea, let alone a ship or a sailor. There is a collection of conch shells at the school, and children hold a shell carefully to their ear, to listen to the echo of the distant surf breaking on the rocky coast so far away, or perhaps to the ghostly echoes of the great inland sea which once covered much of this land. The dancing mistress also teaches ballet and doesn’t hesitate to demonstrate the steps, twirling and pirouetting on pudgy little feet. Fifty years later I go to a ceilidh in Carrick-on-Shannon and see genuine Irish dancing, the dancers costumed in brilliant green and gold satin appliqued with ancestral symbols from the Book of Kells. Hands by sides and backs straight they spring and twirl in intricate gravity-defying patterns; their control is perfect. I realise then how heavy our feet were as we clumped through the Australian version of Irish reels and jigs in the weathershed at Wallangarra.
The coming of spring brings a great awakening, and I realise there are other gardens besides those of my mother and Granny, which were full of exotic flowers and fenced off from the weeds and the rainforest. My gardens are now secret and austere places hidden among the rocks where, in spring, the wild clematis sprawls over the sun-warmed boulders, its white and green mixed with purple trails of hardenbergia. Up and down the slopes the wattles bloom in every crevice and the air is heavy with their pollen. Parrots squabble and feast on the gum blossoms, suck the sticky fruit of the mistletoe, and spread the seeds to fresh branches. I creep away here to daydream alone.
At this time writers such as May Gibbs and Ida Rentoul Outh-waite are rewriting the bush, animating its creatures and giving them English attitudes and speech. Their cosy creations — wattle fairies, gumnut people, Dot’s Kangaroo and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie — are all attempts to see the bush in the same terms as English fairy stories. But The Wind in the Willows, for instance, with its funny cuddly animals, doesn’t transplant to Australia, that land of scraggy gum trees and sharp rocks that trip the feet of white children and skin their knees. It’s possible that there are areas and dimensions, sights, smells, spaces and stories to which the white consciousness has absolutely no access. The real stories of the bush are those of the long-ago Dreamtime, and there are no Aborigines left here to tell them, even if they could be persuaded to do so. My wildflowers too are alien; they belong only to the bush and refuse to be domesticated. The clematis wilts in my hands and the wattle dries up and withers before I get it home to the waiting jam jars.
The Depression is now biting hard and work is closing down. After little over a year on six pounds a week my father and all the meatworkers are put onto part time, two days a week. On this they have no chance of paying the rent, let alone feeding their families. Meals of rabbit, stewed pigeons or wild duck become more regular. Sometimes there is casual work, when a wheat train pulls into the New South Wales platform and the heavy bags have to be transhipped. One evening at dusk, crossing the railway platform, I catch sight of my father bent over like a hunchback, lumping heavy bags of wheat from one side of the platform to the other. He has been doing this all day, and on many other days. I avert my eyes, but this brief glimpse stays in my mind forever. Hard toil, hard yakka is to be his lot for life, and if you add to this an unquiet home, you can see what his life was like. He actually dies of hard work, of an enlarged heart, six weeks before he is eligible for th
e pension. Eventually the meatworks at Wallangarra close down completely and, after a flurry of telegrams and phone calls, he is offered a place at Anderson’s meatworks at Byron Bay and, before we know it, we are back home, back in that magic circle whose central point is the lighthouse on the Cape.
The lighthouse
Because there are no houses to rent, we live in a tent in a paddock close (too close) to the meatworks, on a narrow triangle between the bitumen road and the railway line. This has previously been a camp site for other meatworkers; there is an outside toilet and a blackened tin fireplace with hooks for a kettle and a camp oven. We are on a clean grassy patch, but between us and the works the ground is churned up with suspicious grave-like mounds. We are not allowed to go even a little way in that direction. The tent is large, calico curtains divide it for privacy, and everything, even my mother’s prized Singer sewing machine, is fitted in somehow. It’s always neat and clean; it has to be for four of us to fit into so small a space. My sister and I sleep on a three-quarter size stretcher with all our toys, books and clothes in boxes underneath, and I am allocated the space hard up against the tent wall.
On fine days the flaps are lifted out and the breezes blow through, but on wet days the wind and rain howl around and our parents hurry out to loosen the ropes and drive the tent pegs in further. I lie snug in bed with the sodden side of the tent flapping close to my face, tracing with a finger the pattern of mildew on the calico. Often the storm roars outside and huge breakers smash down on the shingle, for the bay faces north-east and is unprotected from that direction; only the sandhills stand between us and the storms. But worse still are the tempests within the tent walls. Voices are raised; the kerosene lamp throws grotesque shadows on the canvas and I lie with my fingers in my ears. At such times the tent seems to pulsate with its own inner life, as if unable to contain the anger which fills its space. Despite the atmospherics, these are some of the happiest days of my childhood.
The gramophone has come with us and is wound up on the pine kitchen table in the tent. Our mother’s taste has shifted along to the blues, to the big bands with their trombones and saxophones, and to sentimental lyrics such as
Hands across the table
Meet so Tenderly
Though you close your lips, your fingertips
Tell me all I want to know.
The music floats out over the lantana and the sandhills to the sea, startling both passers-by and seagulls as we play one record after another until they are almost worn out. If others look down on us for living in a tent, we are unaware of it, for these months are like an idyllic holiday. We swim, fish, play with the dog on the beach, watch the steamers arrive at the jetty or, on long Sunday afternoons, walk miles along the beach to those secluded valleys which are now Wattegoes Beach and Palm Valley, and then climb the steep hill to the lighthouse.
I spend the night in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage with my school friend, the daughter of the Head Keeper. I wake to the dazzling wash of sunlight reflected from the sea, and watch the breakers far, far down a giddy slope, dotted with the figures of the lighthouse goats. This is a world apart, a neat and nautical world with its own strict conventions. Everything is whitewashed and shipshape; everything is in its place. The lighthouse children go to school in a cart pulled by a strong little pony. The same vehicle collects them each afternoon, together with supplies and mail, and the pony pulls the cart back up the steep and winding road to the Cape. This family has its own folklore, stories of lonely postings to stormy lighthouses around the coast of Tasmania and Victoria and, more recently, to Solitary Island, of school lessons by correspondence and of infrequent visits by supply ships. I am taken high up into the tower to view the light and drops of mercury are placed in my palm. These miraculous silver spheres, rightly known as quicksilver, roll around in my palm, form new wholes, break up and then dissolve into one another like dreams, or memories, or desires:
I hold my map of the Bay in my mind and cherish it. It’s the map of memory and desire, its central point the lighthouse on the Cape, dazzling white and pure. Everything radiates from that centre. From dawn to sunrise the lighthouse advances steadily towards the sun and, over the aromatic islands of the Pacific — Fiji, Vanuatu, Tahiti — the sun dances to the meeting and embraces the tower on the Cape.
At night it is different; from dusk to dawn the light moves in its steady arc, blessing everything over which it passes. It sweeps out to sea over the Julian Rocks, over the beach with its two jetties, the old and the new, and between them the inshore wreck of the first Wollongbar, caught in a storm in the early twenties. It passes then over a lighted camp behind the sandhills, with the gramophone playing jazz on the kitchen table. It passes over the windy little town behind its row of Norfolk Island pines, and sweeps the heights of St Helena. As the light passes over the escarpments, they dream of their past, of the bullock teams, the great cedar logs, the ‘shoots’ down to the plain and the waiting sailing-ships in the bay, and back before them the black tribes on the beach and in the rainforest.
On sunny days we sit for hours on the solid squared girders that edge the jetty, dreamily watching the dappled sunlight on the shallows, the shoals of whiting transparent against the shingle, or a shovel-nose shark cruising in lazy circles. Further out the tide swirls around piers encrusted with barnacles and periwinkles. As each wave recedes the barnacles spew salt water, only to gulp it back in the next leaden swirl, a continuous and hypnotic process. We watch the Pulganbar and the second Wollongbar, ships of the NCSN, the North Coast Steam Navigation Company, dock at the jetty. A branch line of the railway runs right to the end of the jetty, and a tram, hauled by a small engine called the Green Frog, takes the passengers and their baggage to and from the main railway station. We are shown over the ship by the crew; wide-eyed at the luxury of snug cabins and silver service in the dining salon, we speculate about the rich people who travel in such style. This is the usual means of travel to Sydney, for the railway bridge over the Clarence River is not opened until 1932. This service ends completely when war breaks out, and the second Wollongbar is sunk by a Japanese submarine off Crescent Head.
In this place our father is kind; he teaches us to rig up a light line each, and how to thread the beach worms or pippies on the hook. He teaches me to swim in Belongil Creek, brackish with the runoff from the heath, then watches over us from above as we swim in the waves beside the jetty. When the tailor are running the activity is frantic as he and the other men cast and trawl from the deep end of the jetty, using a white rag in place of bait, and haul the heavy fish in hand over hand as fast as they can throw out their lines. Catching a jewfish is a major triumph; it can be sold for sixpence a pound to Feros’s cafe. A fifty-pound jewfish keeps our father happy and cashed up for weeks.
Sometimes a dangerous shark, perhaps a grey nurse, is spotted in the surf and there is no swimming until it’s caught. There are rumours that a small stray dog is used as live bait, the big shark-hook threaded right through the gut. To the fishermen and life-savers the end justifies the means; the shark could, after all, take a child. This rumour fascinates the children, for they are attracted by cruelty, but it seems too horrible to be true. Meanwhile the great grey shark is hauled up onto the jetty, its blood-stained fangs a reminder that everything in the natural world kills or is killed.
In later years the same jetty becomes the ramp up which the carcases of whales, harpooned as they pass the Bay on their annual migration, are hauled to the flensing floor. Knee-deep in blood and gore, the workers, some of them Norfolk Islanders, first test the mammary glands of the females to see whether they were suckling young. If they were it’s too late, for their calves will die, but the harpoonist is heavily fined. This trade ceases only when so many whales have been slaughtered that there is no profit in it, and the whaling station is abandoned.
The town itself is resolutely working-class. Perhaps the workers sometimes lift their eyes to the incredible beauty around them, but it is mostly taken for gr
anted, as if all the world were like this natural paradise. It is known as The Bay to all North Coast people from the Tweed to the Clarence, as if it were the only bay ever, which it is to them. The men all work on dairy farms, in timber mills, the meatworks, or the NORCO factory, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. Here they process the butter, cheese, hams and tinned meats which are exported to feed the Empire and its armies. Sixty years later its now vacant cold room is used as a meditation centre, the OOOOoooommms bouncing off the walls and filling the space with intolerable vibrations. In the thirties the hotels cater, not for tourists, but for cattle buyers and commercial travellers. Two-storey timber buildings burn down regularly, to the secret excitement of the crowd, and at this time the Great Northern Hotel has just been rebuilt after a second inferno, while the venerable Pier Hotel is to burn down a decade later. The new Great Northern is an ugly brick structure which as a child I pass with averted eyes, hating the stench of beer and the loud voices, one of which I sometimes recognise.
We wander to school any way we please, along the railway line, through the town or, best of all, along the beach. We carry our sandals and splash through the shallows, or follow the high tide mark, picking up cowries, striped dog shells and pearl shells. The sea changes from day to day; it is usually placid, but occasionally roars in beneath grey skies, with twenty-foot waves pounding on the shingle, dragging tons of sand back with every ebb and cutting great swathes out of the beach. The wreck of the first Wollongbar, an angular iron shape half-buried in the sand and festooned with weed, is sometimes submerged, sometimes close enough for us to wade out to but for the strong eddies and deep holes around it. This Wollongbar, once a racy steamer and the pride of the NCSN fleet, was tied up to the jetty one day in 1921 when a storm blew in from the north-east, increasing in power as the day wore on until, to the horror of her crew and the onlookers, her ropes gave way, the anchors dragged and she bumped her way broadside, lifted by the wind and each succeeding wave onto the beach, to become a tourist sight for a decade, until it was almost submerged by sand and sea.