Growing Pineapples in the Outback

by Tony Kelly

  Diana and I have never discussed the tragedy of Michael’s life, the deaths he was responsible for – the hit-and-run victim on the Gold Coast, his own son and then himself. She barely acknowledges her grief with Beck, let alone with me. But I’m aware that these events led her to close down somewhat, to withdraw to such an extent that her sharp wit became dulled. But now, living with her, I see glimpses of it more and more, especially when Beck is around. Diana is peeling off the layers. They both are, in fact. Whether it’s all the sun or being back in her childhood home and living with her mum – or perhaps it’s menopause – Beck is letting her natural joyful countenance shine, and this is rubbing off on her mum.

  I hobble into the kitchen just as Diana is about to pour some whisky into a pot on the stove. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  ‘Making corned beef,’ she says.

  ‘With whisky?’

  ‘Of course not. Vinegar.’ Diana peers closely at the bottle. ‘Oh, I see.’ She laughs. ‘That would have made it interesting.’

  ‘Disgusting, I reckon.’

  ‘Yes, I suspect you’re right.’

  I get the vinegar from the cupboard, hand it to Diana and take the whisky from her. ‘I better have a shot.’

  ‘Medicinal purposes,’ Diana retorts.

  ‘Of course. How about yourself?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  By the end of the second day I’m feeling much better and challenge Diana to a game of Upwords. I win, just. I say goodnight and head to bed. As I walk down the hall I hear her humming a tuneless warble. I smile. I text Beck from bed:

  I don’t think your mum’s going anywhere in a hurry.

  Beck replies:

  I better come back then.

  I text:

  Only if you want xxx

  7

  A Fresh Start

  Rebecca

  The excitement of nearly being home begins with my first glimpse of the Selwyn Range. From my seat on the plane I can see its seams stretching across the land. They are made up of red hills with almost rounded tops. Sprinkled across the hills are sparse gums and gidgee. I can tell there has been a bit of rain as there’s a green tinge across the landscape, and between the hills I can see pools of water. It looks quite fresh but even when it’s dry and bleak, which is most of the year, I find it beautiful. The landscape is so familiar, and for me it’s home.

  I shut my eyes and lean my head against the window. I have been awake for over twenty-four hours and feel pretty average.

  I have travelled a lot over the past few months, and am keen to get back to Tony, Mum and Madang Street and settle back into a routine. Before Christmas I worked on two shows in Melbourne, and then I spent Christmas on the Gold Coast with Georgina, her boyfriend and Tony’s family. Now it’s early February and I’m returning from two weeks’ travel around Japan with Lucille. In the last twenty-four hours I have flown from Tokyo to Cairns to Townsville, and I’m now on the last leg to Mount Isa.

  Tomorrow I start a drama project for Disability Services, and later in the week I begin my contract social work position at Mount Isa Headspace as the partnership broker. It’s a research and development project looking at mental health in the workplace. I feel as though, at last, I am over the unemployment hump.

  I open my tray table and take out my diary. For the last few weeks I have been compiling a list of New Year’s resolutions. I do this most Januarys but rarely keep to the resolutions for more than a few days. There have been times when I’ve thought I may as well just go down to the local gym, donate $500 and tell them I’ll see them again the following January. It would save me a lot of angst. Regardless, compiling lists, be they of resolutions or tasks, is something I have always done.

  My current list has all the regular ‘mores’ – more exercise, singing, dancing, reading, writing, gardening and loving. I think the most therapeutic part is simply putting pen to paper. It forces me to take a moment to think and reflect. I really do want to have more of these ‘mores’ in my life, yet I suspect that I’ll just watch more episodes of my favourite shows instead.

  I go back to looking out the window. The ground is zigzagged with tracks and trails that appear to lead nowhere. From up here the landscape seems to stretch on forever without any sign of life. This is harsh country. Over the years I’ve heard many stories of people who have been lost or gone missing in the bush. I have great respect for the wilderness but I am not afraid of it. As kids we were taken into the bush to waterholes and creeks, where we would swim and have picnics. We were introduced to it as a place to respect.

  Mum has always loved the bush and has no fear of it either. I find this a bit surprising, as when she was a little girl she got lost in the bush for two nights and three days. It was April 1928, and Mum was four years old and at a church picnic in Coradgery West, sixteen miles from Trundle, in central New South Wales. She was with her father and two younger siblings, Hilary and Mary. Her mother was in hospital, having just given birth to a baby girl.

  ‘The older children were playing hide and seek,’ Mum once told me. ‘I had never played it before and didn’t know the rules. I watched the other children darting in and out of the bush around the picnic area and thought it was a chasing game.’

  Mum took off into the scrub. She ran for a long time and finally found a burnt-out stump and hid behind it. She couldn’t see any of the other children and felt pleased at how well she was doing in the game. After a short time she took off again and kept running further into the bush. She didn’t notice how far she had gone until the light started to fade.

  Back at the picnic ground, people began to pack up. Mum’s father noticed she was missing. No one knew where she was. Things escalated quickly: search parties of men were assembled and the women organised food and drink for the searchers. My grandfather gathered together a prayer group in the hope that his fervent belief would provoke a miracle and his daughter would be found.

  For two nights and three days Mum wandered through the bush. I asked her what she remembered.

  ‘I drank water from the puddles,’ she said.

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘I remember being scared once. I saw the search party on horses and they had lanterns.’

  ‘Were they calling out your name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I ran off and hid.’

  ‘Where did you sleep?’

  ‘I tucked myself in under some bushes.’

  In town, the men started making plans to dredge the surrounding dams, and trackers were called in to help find the little lost girl. At the hospital, Mum’s mother was frantic with worry – and then the unthinkable happened. A nurse dropped the newborn baby girl, Pauline, and she died.

  ‘Oh god!’ I said. ‘That’s so awful! What was that like when you found out?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  I found this really strange. Mum has an excellent memory, particularly for things from years ago. I didn’t want to pathologise the experience, but it seemed impossible not to think about the effects of trauma on memory.

  ‘You don’t remember your parents telling you?’ I asked.

  ‘We didn’t talk about things like that.’

  ‘What – things like death?’

  Mum didn’t answer.

  ‘But didn’t you wonder where the baby was?’

  Again she didn’t answer.

  ‘You must have known that your mother was pregnant and going to have a baby?’

  ‘I have no recollection of being aware of it one way or the other,’ she said at last.

  ‘But it must have affected your mother?’

  ‘Mum was never particularly maternal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Mum shrugged and was silent for a moment. ‘My parents were probably ill-suited to each other,’ she said. ‘Dad was a religious int
ellectual and Mum liked dances, horse riding, gardening and playing cards.’

  Later, I asked Mum’s sister Mary about this time, and she told me that she thought the loss of the baby affected their mother’s mental health. ‘Mum was never very affectionate or warm with us,’ she said. ‘She was prone to outbursts of temper and ignoring us, yet would lavish attention on other people’s children.’

  Their very pious and staunch Anglican minister father was, from all accounts, not particularly emotive either. He was committed to the church and ensuring that his children were well educated. Although born and raised in St Kilda, in Melbourne, my grandfather seemed to find some kind of solace in rural and remote Queensland. He moved the family to Aramac, in central Queensland, and became a travelling minister for a diocese that spread over a large area. He was often away for long stretches of time.

  Aunty Mary talked about this as a fairly unpleasant time, and she missed her father a great deal. ‘I seemed to irritate Mum, and she didn’t want me around,’ she told me. ‘Dad ended up taking me with him on his circuit, and I was much happier when I was with him.’

  I have often wondered if my grandmother would have been happier married to someone who worked the land rather than a minister.

  ‘She liked the status of being married to a minister,’ Aunty Mary told me, ‘but it was hard work. She spent a lot of her time raising money for the church and doing things for other people but we often missed out.’

  Eventually my grandparents separated. I suspect this caused them great shame; it was certainly not the done thing. I have often wondered if this was the reason Mum stuck by Dad for all those years. There were certainly times when I questioned why on earth they had chosen to stay together as they both seemed so miserable.

  Silence is a recurring theme in my family. I think back to the death of my little nephew, Michael Pancho, just before his first birthday, and remember the silence that surrounded that tragedy. As with the disappearance of my brother, nobody spoke about it. I can remember feeling gutted and confused. It was so unfair. How could such a sweet and happy little baby die like that, so unintentionally?

  I was in Year 11 at the time. My best friend, Lisa, had been diagnosed with leukaemia and was very sick. These two things threw me into a sort of existential crisis. I began to feel ambivalent about school, and wondered what the point of anything was.

  I decided to leave school at the end of the year, and applied for an apprenticeship as an electrician at the mines. I had spent a lot of time sitting in my room taking apart my radio, calculator and cassette player, so I thought perhaps I would enjoy that sort of thing. In reality I was taking things apart because I was bored and frustrated, not because I was particularly interested in electronics.

  I received news that I had been accepted into the trade at the end of the school year, and I think that this was all I needed to turn things around. I didn’t want to be an electrician; I just wanted to know that there was something else out there beyond my family and our grief.

  I went back to school and began Year 12, and then Lisa died. But for once there was not silence. Mum knew I was fragile, and she spent hours with me gently talking about life and loss. Dad even rallied and acknowledged that he understood my grief. I suspect that Lisa was far enough removed from both of them that they were able to offer empathy. Regardless, it was what I needed. Though deeply saddened by the death of my adorable friend, I found my feet again and got on with school and all that was happening around me.

  And the little lost girl?

  ‘After three days I wandered into a homestead on a property ten miles from where I went missing,’ Mum told me. ‘My feet were cut and bleeding, and the elastic in my bloomers was broken but I had clung to the top of them for the three days so that they wouldn’t fall off. For months after being found I had to have physiotherapy each day, with a wooden peg, to release the closed grip that my fingers and fist had formed.’ Holding a pen in her hand, Mum showed me how she had to work it along her palm and down her fingers.

  At the homestead, the grazier picked Mum up and said to his wife, ‘I have found the little lost girl.’

  In what became a favourite family quote, Mum replied, ‘No, I have found myself.’

  As we fly over the ranges, I add to my list in my diary: ‘Take Mum out bush more.’

  Mum loves going for drives out bush, sitting under a tree, having a cup of tea and doing a crossword or just watching the landscape. I am aware that over the past few months I’ve found all sorts of excuses to not do this: too busy, too hot, too hard.

  A couple of years ago, Mum had a fall in the car park of the Buffs Club as she was getting into Belinda’s four-wheel drive, and since then she has refused to travel in anything other than a sedan. She was hurt and embarrassed by the fall, and it rocked her confidence. I know I’ve used this as a reason not to head out for afternoon drives. It’s a pretty lame excuse, though, as there are lots of places we can go to that don’t need a four-wheel drive.

  As kids, we used to go out to creeks and waterholes and we never had a four-wheel drive then. We also spent a lot of time roaming around the bushland on the outskirts of town, and entire afternoons playing in the scrub down the creek. I don’t recall Mum ever checking up on us or telling us to take water, a hat or shoes, or warning us about ‘stranger danger’. We were never alone, and it was just assumed that we had enough common sense to look after ourselves.

  December 1966. I was four years old, and was playing on the swing in the backyard with my brother David. Mum was burning rubbish in the incinerator. It was hot and sunny, and I was wearing a yellow A-line shift that Mum had made.

  My grandmother was in town, staying at my cousins’ house. I had only just met her for the first time, so she was a big attraction. I hadn’t heard much about her other than that she lived for a number of years in Alice Springs, and more recently in London. I knew London from the poem ‘Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat’, and so in my mind Grandma was as good as related to the Queen, hence my desire to spend time with her.

  I swung back and forwards on the swing set and whined, ‘When are we going to visit Grandma?’

  Mum had answered this question quite a few times, so didn’t give me much of a response.

  ‘When?’ I asked again.

  ‘Maybe when Dad gets home after work,’ she said at last. ‘Or maybe on the weekend.’

  ‘I want to go now!’

  Mum and David ignored me.

  I remember standing at the back gate. I wasn’t wearing shoes. We never wore shoes around the house or when we played; no one did. I said to Mum and David, ‘I’m going to visit Grandma!’

  Mum took no notice of me. She continued to burn things in the incinerator, and David kept playing on the swing.

  So I headed off down the street to visit Grandma. No one tried to stop me.

  I didn’t get very far. At the end of the street a woman called out to me, ‘Where are you going, little girl?’

  ‘To visit my grandmother.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Down there.’ I pointed towards the Barkly Highway.

  The woman came out of her yard. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘Would you like to come in for a glass of cordial and a biscuit, Rebecca?’

  I liked the sound of that and went into the woman’s house. She gave me some cordial and a biscuit. While I ate and drank, she made a phone call. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but she said my name and ‘Soldiers Hill’. I knew that I lived in Soldiers Hill.

  After the phone call, the woman asked, ‘Would you like to help me with the housework?’

  I liked helping Mum with the housework, so I said yes. I didn’t tell the woman that I really only liked three housework jobs, and they were polishing ornaments, dusting, and putting the washing through the ringer on top of the washing machine, but I wa
s only allowed to do that with Mum’s assistance.

  Whenever I helped Mum, I only had to do it for a short time, and then we’d have a tea break. That was the part of helping that I liked the most.

  ‘Great – you can help me make the beds!’ the woman said. She smiled a lot. I didn’t like making beds but I didn’t tell the woman this. She seemed quite excited so I wondered if it might be more fun than bed-making at my own home.

  The woman asked a lot of questions. She wanted to know how old I was, if I had brothers and sisters, where my dad worked, if I went to school. I could answer most of the questions but I didn’t know where Dad worked. ‘He makes the smoke come out of the stack,’ I told her.

  The woman laughed. ‘Really?’

  I nodded, because this was what Dad had told me, pointing to the smelter stack as he did.

  I forgot all about visiting Grandma. Eventually we finished making the beds and went into the lounge. I wondered if it might be tea break time.

  There was a knock at the door, and I saw Mum standing on the verandah. At first I was disappointed as things were going so well with the woman that I thought I might stay for longer. But I was also excited to see Mum, because I thought perhaps Mum and the woman would become friends. In my mind this was quite logical. The woman liked housework and Mum liked housework so it seemed a good match. Mum came into the house.

  ‘You must have been worried sick?’ the woman said to her.

  I didn’t follow what Mum said, as all I could think was that something bad had happened at home. Why else would Mum be worried?