‘Well, when can I meet him? My mother has no young children, she can pay the full amount of money and, as for his personal evaluation, I can tell you my mother’s the biggest snob you could ever meet, apart from being very nice.’ I arranged to meet the owner at the apartment in two days’ time. I explained that because my mother was still so distressed, I would like to meet him first, and if there was any chance, then I would bring her along.
I was quite nervous when I walked up the stairs two days later. The apartment was perfect for Mum, and I knew I wouldn’t find anything else like it, well not in our price bracket. The agent had confirmed that. It all depended on an eccentric old man.
I pressed the bell, took a deep breath and waited. The door opened and a man of about seventy-five stood before me. He was stooped, but had agile, piercing eyes and looked very aggressive.
‘What do you want?’
‘How do you do, I’m here about the unit. My . . .’
‘You’re too young.’ Slam!
I stood facing the closed door. My only thought was, Wow! I took a deep breath and pressed again. The door opened and he let fly with both barrels.
‘I told you already, I’m . . .’
I fired back. ‘I am not buying, my mother is, and she is seventy-seven.’
We stood there glaring at each other, breathing fast. I saw a small twinkle in his eye.
‘Come in.’ He turned abruptly and walked ahead of me.
‘Tea?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Get it over there.’ He waved his hand towards the kitchen, the twinkling eyes watching me. I decided to let him win this round. We drank the tea in silence. I wasn’t going to put my foot in it now. He broke the silence.
‘Who are you?’ I gave him a quick outline on Mum. Widow, President of the Red Cross, State Champion Bowler, model citizen and so on.
When I had finished, he said, ‘I’ll give you an answer in a month.’ His eyes were dull. I knew I had lost him.
‘Oh, please, I must go home. I live in the Northern Territory and I can’t leave before I settle Mum.’ On the words ‘Northern Territory’ the twinkle returned.
‘What part of the Territory?’ I could tell by the way he said ‘Territory’, it was in his blood. I was back in the race. I chose my words carefully.
‘Oh, not in any town. I live on a cattle station, very remote.’ The eyes were young again, looking into the past.
‘Anywhere near Auvergne?’
‘Why, Auvergne is our next door neighbour over the mountain range. In fact, our station was part of Auvergne until 1959 when a million acres was taken from Auvergne’s five million, and called Bullo River. We bought it a few years later, no improvements whatsoever, just an airstrip and a road.’
‘What’s the road like into Bullo?’
I paused. I don’t know whether it was intuition or what, but when he asked that question I detected a subtle change in his expression, and instead of telling him exactly what I thought of our fifty-mile nightmare, I found myself saying, ‘What a marvellous example of engineering knowhow. How the engineer ever managed to get a road into that valley is beyond me.’
He sat up very straight, and his chest expanded. My intuition had been spot on.
‘I built that road.’
‘No!’ We spent the rest of the day going over every rock in that road and in a number of other roads as well. His road-building career in the Northern Territory had spanned forty years.
‘Tell the agent to send the papers over first thing in the morning and I’ll sign them.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Nonsense, have to get you back to your family on the station.’ And for the first time he smiled. I raced down the stairs and out of sight before he changed his mind.
After moving Mum into her new home, I decided it was time to get back to the station. All my brothers and my sister lived in Sydney, so I was leaving her in good hands.
My return to the station obviously took Charles by surprise. He had a female there. She had arrived just a few hours ahead of me.
There were no hysterics, I didn’t even ask any questions. Losing Poppa and looking after Mum for two months had drained me clean of any emotion. I felt nothing.
They presented me with some stupid story. I just looked at her with contempt—I didn’t bother to look at Charles—and moved into Marlee’s room. This was now a regular occurrence, so it went unremarked by the children.
I slept in, and Charles came into the room wanting to know why I wasn’t cooking breakfast.
‘Let your lady friend whip up a few meals.’
‘But she’s not here to cook.’
I glared at him and he backed out of the room. A few days in the kitchen soon dispelled any fancy ideas she may have had about life with Charlie. She packed her bags and left. I stayed in Marlee’s room for a few more weeks.
My birthday was approaching, so to put the ‘show back on the road’ Charles made an effort to do something special.
The year before he had made a big mistake on my birthday. His gift to me was a beer-making kit!
‘A beer-making kit!’ I said, horrified. ‘Why would you think I’d be interested in a beer-making kit?’
‘Well, we are always running out of beer.’
‘Charles, we would need a factory, not a kit, to keep up with the amount of beer consumed here! Besides, I hardly touch the stuff, you’re the one who drinks it non-stop.’
He didn’t reply. I would make it, he would drink it. He couldn’t understand why this wasn’t acceptable to me.
However I did manage to get my revenge, a few months later at Christmas. Of course I never made any beer, but the kit remained in my mind.
He opened his gift on Christmas morning.
‘What on earth is this?’ he said, as yards of black lace and silk tumbled from the box.
‘It’s a black negligee, don’t you like it?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I wouldn’t wear that!’
‘Oh good, then I’ll have it.’
He smiled. ‘Touché.’
So this time he had to come up with a winner, and he did.
The children had baked a cake and with great ceremony they lit the candles and sang happy birthday, as I blew them out. Then a large carton was placed in front of me. I opened the top and it was full of money, all scrunched up.
‘Is it all money?’ I asked in disbelief.
‘Yes,’ said Charles smugly.
It was one thousand dollars in one-dollar bills. It took hours to count it, but it was great fun. He was forgiven for the beer-making kit, but only the beer-making kit!
At the end of that year we all went to Darwin for a few days to do the Christmas shopping. Usually Charles did it all by himself, so it was a special treat for the children. We stayed with Gus at Fannie Bay.
The shopping for the presents and food all done, we started packing up our mountain of purchases ready to take to the plane early the next morning. However, when we got out to the airport, radio trouble. So we unpacked all the perishables and went back to Fannie Bay while Charles looked for a man to repair the radio. It was Christmas Eve, and as the hours passed, we discussed the option of spending Christmas with Gus. However, I was tired and wanted to get back to the station and also, we had Christmas dinner and all the presents for the people back there.
So at around two-thirty p.m. we took off, about twelve hours ahead of Cyclone Tracy. We were flying southwest and the weather deteriorated as we moved along the coastline. It reminded me of typhoon weather in the Philippines.
By the time we reached the Victoria River, Charles was flying at around forty feet. We flew up the river, low over the water and did a right turn into the Bullo Valley. It was raining as we landed. Grey-black clouds swirled around over the hills, then slowly descended and blocked out the world. It stayed that way for about two weeks. A few times the sun peeped through, but not often.
We found out on Christmas morning that Cyclone Trac
y had hit Darwin during the night and that Darwin had been virtually destroyed. Charles tried to contact Gus and other friends, but our communication was still by radio, and this was difficult at the best of times, let alone with Darwin in chaos.
Early on Boxing Day Charles flew into Kununurra to try and contact Gus. While in the air, he was contacted by flight service and asked if he would fly to Darwin and start aerial spraying for disease control. Of course Charles wanted to go straight to the rescue. He returned to Bullo and I packed the plane full of food, water, clothes and bedding. According to the reports, there was nothing in Darwin—there had been no power or water since Christmas night, and everything in refrigeration was now rotten. After receiving strict instructions from me about how he was not to drink the water, and only to eat tinned food and so on, he took off for Darwin. I had no idea when I would see him again.
While he was flying from Bullo to Darwin, a two-hour trip in our dear old Beaver, Darwin was declared in a state of emergency and suddenly new laws were in force. The first of these was that Darwin was closed to all air traffic except military.
When Charles finally reached Darwin and called in, he was told to go away. Darwin was now a restricted area. Charles was furious but no amount of explaining could convince the control tower of his authorised mission. So, needing fuel, and being Charles, he just landed and was promptly arrested.
Eventually the mess was sorted out and Charles was given a pass, so he went to find Gus. The house was almost gone. The front bedroom on the second floor no longer existed and the one remaining wall of the second bedroom was leaning dangerously. The roof was gone. The front wall of the living room had blown in, the laundry and bathroom downstairs were still standing, but all the plants were gone and the trees that remained had no leaves on them. However Gus was okay, as were other family members and friends.
Charles arrived back at Bullo with a plane full of pets. People were being moved out of Darwin in their hundreds, and no provision had been made for all the pets. Charles never described the trip back, but I am sure it was interesting. He had canaries, cats, dogs, budgerigars . . . When we opened the doors of the plane chaos reigned. Charles just walked away with his hands in the air.
Months later I went to Darwin with Charles and, even after all that time, the place still had a look of devastation. Cleaning up was in progress, hotels were in operation, some shops were open and leaves were appearing on some of the trees, but there was a long way to go.
Darwin was never really the same again. Out of the old Darwin rose a new Darwin, with many more people. The unsophisticated town we had known was gradually replaced by a city.
CHAPTER 14
1975-1980
According to our old telegram book, on the 25th of February 1975, Wyndham Radio, the Royal Flying Doctors’ base, was closed and all the traffic it had normally handled was now to be handled by Derby. Because we were in the Northern Territory, we were directed to Darwin, and so our old call sign of S.O.V., which had been our call sign since 1963, was laid to rest. I cannot remember how many times I screamed ‘Sierra Oscar Victor’ into that antiquated Treager Radio amidst crackle and static.
In the telegram book is written: ‘End of S.O.V. and Wyndham Radio’. Just one line, written by one of the staff helping me in the office at that time. She did not know of the long months during the wet season when it was our only link with the outside world. As the rains increased and we became isolated in our own little world, Radio Wyndham would reach in daily, and assure us the world was still there.
Many times the operators talked people through a medical emergency until the plane arrived with a doctor, or spoke to the part of the family in the civilised world on our behalf during a family problem or crisis. I am sure anyone who lived in this area in the fifties, sixties or seventies, and who relied on Radio Wyndham as their lifeline, carries Radio Wyndham in a little corner of their heart.
The next page of the telegram book reads:
27/2/75
VJY Darwin—New radio call sign
S.L.I. ‘Sierra Lima India’
We were in the big league now. No more chatting and swapping cooking recipes. VJY covered a big area, with a big switchboard and many operators. Over the years they all became friends and were as essential to our lifestyle as Wyndham Radio.
With VJY Darwin came a new radio. Our old Treager did not have the strength to reach 200 miles to Darwin, so it was also ‘laid to rest’ and in its place we purchased a sleek small Codan two-way radio with a press-button microphone. On our old Treager, you flipped a switch and shouted at the middle of the machine. With the two-way radio, we could hear the news at 6.45 each morning as it was broadcast by VJY. This brought us up-to-date with the news of the world on a twenty-four hour basis. Until then, we had relied on a twice-monthly delivery of Newsweek magazine by mail plane. Of course during the rainy season it was back to Newsweek as we couldn’t hear a thing.
The next invention that came our way was a radio telephone. Now we were in the super league. To have a private conversation on a phone and a reply then and there, instead of waiting days for a telegram, was magical. However there was a catch. We had to work through the switchboard in Darwin, and to get an operator it was not unusual to have to wait hours for a free line.
As the network expanded, it was decided to regulate calls. We could call in on the hour to book calls, then the operators would spend the rest of the hour handling incoming calls and calling our booked calls. The operators did a sterling job but there were never enough lines.
Of course Charles did not think the system applied to him. He looked upon the operators as his personal assistants and would call in and book twenty or thirty calls at a time, to be put through at specific times during the day. When the operator refused, he would scream, ‘Put on your supervisor!’ and when the supervisor refused, he would scream, ‘Put on your supervisor!’ and so on, until one day he was speaking to a Managing Director for Telecom in Melbourne. There was a long conversation, a lot of shouting by Charles, but the next day, he was back to square one, speaking to the operator.
Charles always considered himself ‘Admiral of the fleet’ not mere ‘Captain of the ship’, and until we moved to Bullo he had never answered a phone—he had always had a secretary to screen the calls, and if he didn’t want to talk he would dictate a message for her to pass on. When we moved to the Outback Charles tried to maintain this system, so along with the titles of cook, schoolteacher and so on, I acquired that of substitute secretary.
The office was a good twenty-five-yard dash from the kitchen and schoolroom where I would be busy cooking or teaching. The phone had an amplifier on the ring tone, so it made quite a loud noise. I would run to answer it only to find Charles sitting right next to it, reading a book.
‘Why in heaven’s name didn’t you answer the phone? I had to run all this way!’
‘I mightn’t want to speak to them,’ he would calmly reply.
‘Well I know I don’t, it’s probably someone asking for money.’
I would answer the phone, ask who was calling and hand him the phone. If he didn’t want to speak, he would say, ‘Tell them this’, or ‘Tell them that’. I would listen to the person, then ask them to wait, tell Charles what they said, listen to Charles’s reply, and so on.
One particularly frenetic day when nothing was going right and the phone was ringing constantly, I decided I’d had enough. Charlie was sitting at the phone desk reading his pirate story and drinking a beer. The phone rang for the twentieth time and I sprinted in to answer it.
‘Hello . . . No sorry, he’s not here.’ I put the phone down and started to walk out of the room.
‘Who was that for?’
‘You.’
‘Me? You said I wasn’t here!’
‘Did I? I wonder why I’d do a thing like that.’
‘Who was it?’ he shouted as I disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
‘Gus,’ I replied.
I stopped
just out of sight and listened.
‘Hello operator, get me Gus.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘Hello, Gus, just came in from the yards. Sara said you’d called.’
I walked back to the kitchen with a smile on my face. Half an hour later when the phone rang, Charles called, ‘I’ll get it, Darling.’
After sitting at the phone desk most of the morning, he would then move into the bedroom and recline on the bed for the afternoon. For this effort he would require constant replenishment of cold beer, cheese and crackers. He would bellow orders all the way to the kitchen, usually to the children, and they would spend their time running backwards and forwards doing his bidding. Eventually I told him that this room service was taking up too much schooltime, and he would just have to walk to the kitchen and do it himself. He then had the bright idea that if Dick could set up a buzzer system, it would save time, and he wouldn’t have to shout.
A Machiavellian scheme began to form in my mind. For Father’s Day we gave him a buzzer next to his bed. He was overjoyed. What we didn’t tell him was that Uncle Dick hadn’t wired it!
The first day he pressed the buzzer and patiently waited. Finally, when no one appeared, he came to the kitchen to tell us he was buzzing. Hadn’t we heard? We all looked at him wide-eyed. He then told us to stand by and he would test the buzzer.
‘Sure, but since you’re here now, why don’t you make your own snack and take it with you.’
It didn’t take him long to realise he was being duped, and the next week found him quietly preparing his own snacks.
A few days later, when we were having a Sunday sleep-in, Charlie said, ‘I’d like breakfast in bed.’
‘Press the buzzer, you never know your luck.’ I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.
By late 1975 it had become evident that Charles was suffering from some kind of health problem. He was definitely not his usual robust self. We went to Darwin to see a doctor. I say ‘we’ because Charles was absolutely convinced that there was nothing wrong with him, and if I had not taken him there in person, he would not have gone at all.
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