In the year of my fifth birthday, the totally unexpected happened. It rained five inches in one night, and we woke in the morning to see our homestead sitting on a comfortable island. The clump of trees behind the house was half submerged. The chickens were clucking nervously on their perches in the night poultry yard, sitting just above the water, and the ducks were sailing magisterially around a vastly enlarged pond. The sheepdogs sat on top of their kennels gazing at the water swirling by, and an army of ants, beetles, scorpions, and other insects milled about at the water’s edge driven before the slowly advancing flood.
In the next few weeks it continued to rain more, so that an unheard-of eight inches had fallen within less than a month. The transformation of the countryside was magical. As far as the eye could see wild flowers exploded into bloom. Each breeze would waft their pollen round the house, making it seem as though we lived in an enormous garden. Everywhere one looked the sites of old creek beds became clear as the water gathered and drained away. Bullrushes shot up beside the watercourses, and suddenly there were waterfowl round about, erupting into flight as one approached. We saw the sky reflected in water for the first time. Stranger still, the whole countryside was green, a color we scarcely knew. Evidences of the fertility of the soil were all about us. Trees sprang up as the waters receded around our house, and before long a new clump of eucalyptus saplings was well launched in life. On walks we would find enormous mushrooms, as large as a dinner plate, but perfectly formed. These we would gather to take home to grill on top of the wood stove, filling the house with a wonderful aroma. Walks became adventures of a new kind because they were likely to reveal some new plant or flower not seen before, or show us why the aboriginal ovens were located where they were, close to what was once a stream or a water hole. We made a wooden raft and poled it cheerfully around the lake near the house, alighting on islands that were old sandhills, now suddenly sprouting grass.
Everywhere one went on the property was a vision of plenty. Dams brimmed with water. Sheep and cattle bloomed with health and nourishment. It was clear that there would be an abundant crop of wool, whiter and longer than any we had ever grown. On the heavier land, tall strong grasses grew resembling the pampas grass of Argentina. My father looked at it dubiously. When it dried it would be a fire hazard, and so a fresh herd of cattle was bought to eat it down and fatten for the market. Best of all, my father planned a late lambing season that year, and the young lambs, nourished by their mothers’ ample milk, frisked away like creatures in a child’s picture book.
My parents were jubilant. My mother was forty-one, my father in his early fifties. I recall them then, in the prime of life, surrounded by their young family, full of plans for the future. Success did not make them complaisant, for in one very important respect they were not like other people in our part of the world. They did not simply concern themselves with local affairs. Their dwelling might be remote but they were conscious of living in a world touched by important political and economic events. They took the Sydney newspapers, even though they came a week late. My mother read avidly about the rise of fascism in Europe. We heard them discuss when war would break out, and what the conflagration would be like this time. My mother, ever passionate in her opinions, was scathing after listening on the crackling radio to Chamberlain’s speech about “peace in our time.” My father, remembering the Somme and Passchendaele, was less certain. Every evening after we children were sent to bed, they sat, by the fire in winter, or in summers on the veranda, while she told him what she had been reading. My bedroom was close to both, so that I have dim memories of her describing the earliest reports of the persecution of the Jews, of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and their use of castor oil. The most heated discussions concerned the rise of Japan as an industrial power. My mother was an avid reader of Pearl Buck’s novels and had a strong sense from them of international rivalries in our Asian Pacific world. She predicted that after Hitler provoked war in Europe, the Japanese would begin to expand in the Pacific. Such conversations always ended with my father reminding her of the might of the British navy and the impregnability of bases like Singapore. Very shortly we were all gathered around the radio straining to hear Churchill’s great speech after Dunkirk, my mother weeping, my father looking very grave.
I hero-worshiped my older brother Bob, six years older than I, and the leader of our childhood expeditions. He was tall for his age, blond, with vivid blue eyes. From an early age, he impressed people with his sense of composure and unusual emotional and physical energy. When you were with him you knew interesting things would happen. He was just enough older than I and our brother, Barry, to be allowed to ride the biggest horses, shoot the best rifles, carry out commissions to do this or that on the place alone. There were enough years between him and me for him to treat me gently as his baby sister, whereas I scuffled and occasionally quarreled with my brother Barry, four years my senior. Of our family, Barry’s was the sunny disposition, and the gentlest of temperaments. Both boys were generous in playing with me, reading to me, entering into my various forms of make-believe. When we were older, both were ready to take me along on the projects I longed to be part of. We rode fences together, often too deep in conversation to pay more than passing attention to the state of the fences. We explored, stopped to climb trees, investigated eagle’s nests, and out of sight of the house, broke the rules against the galloping of horses. As a trio, we were so close to one another that each knew without speech what the other was thinking and feeling.
Mindful of her own childhood, my mother encouraged a strict equality between us. As I played more with my brothers, I was inclined to run to her when the going got too rough. It was not tolerated. “Don’t come running to me,” she said. “If he hits you, hit him back.” On the next occasion when my brother Barry hit me, I had a cricket bat in my hands. Remembering the injunction, I struck out furiously and broke the two newly grown front teeth, previously part of Barry’s customary sunny smile. My parents were shocked, but my mother kept her part of the bargain. “I told her to do it,” she said. “No one must scold her.” Later, away from the heat of the moment, she explained that she had meant hitting back with one’s fists, not more dangerous weapons.
I learned to read sitting under the table where my brothers were being taught school. Miss Grant, their governess, a short, stocky young woman of limited imagination, was perpetually attempting to establish what she thought the proper schoolroom discipline. Hers was a taxing job. Her young charges were both of energetic and inquiring minds which quickly moved well beyond the store of knowledge she had acquired in her country high school. English lessons were simple drills in grammar. Arithmetic was also a question of rules, and geography a matter of memorizing maps. My brothers were diligent enough but quickly became bored with their daily drilling in facts and recitation of rules. Sensing the potential for rebellion, I would often choose such a moment to tease them, tie their shoelaces together, tickle their feet, or engage in other provocations to get them in trouble with Miss Grant. To keep me quiet, I was usually given letters and numbers to trace, and then to copy. My mother, on her endless afternoons ironing in the kitchen, found I knew my letters and set me to reading aloud to her. She told me it was to entertain her and relieve the boredom, but she had me reading proudly before I knew I was being taught. Then, as an encouragement, she would discuss with me which children’s book we should order from her lending library. Thereafter, the weekly parcel brought eleven books for her and one for me. Her teaching was always carried out so imaginatively that her pupils simply had fun gratifying their curiosity. Poor Miss Grant, perpetually afraid of being challenged, tried to rule by threats. “Drink your milk, or you’ll never grow big and tall like your mother,” she would say to still my mutiny at being made to drink children’s milk instead of adult tea at mealtimes. My mother quietly filled a teacup with milk, added a faint dash of tea, and the problem was solved. Inexorably, Miss Grant became a figure of fun for us children. When playing, we would imitate her threats
to one another. My brothers, perfect mimics, would set about teaching me something in precisely her tone of voice. Hers was a lonely life, devoid of recreation outside school hours. She left after eighteen months. She was, however, the very best type of the country governess, and her limitations made my parents advance their plans for sending the boys away to school.
So our idyllic routine was interrupted in 1940 by my brother Bob’s departure for boarding school in Sydney. We had never been parted before and the wrench was as though we were being physically severed. My mother, who adored her handsome firstborn son, was particularly stern with Barry and me as we went to leave Bob at his new Sydney boarding school, five hundred miles and a day and a night’s train journey from home. “If either of you cry, or so much as let out a whimper, I’ll never forgive you,” she said. We obeyed and she fought back her tears till we were out of sight of the school.
My parents now paid the price of having taught us all to be self-reliant and to make our own minds up about things. Bob would not stay in school. He left many times, even going so far as to prepare to ride ticketless on the eighteen-hour train ride back home. After trying several alternatives, my parents dispatched Barry with him the next year to a new school and the two kept one another company so that there were no more breaks for home.
The boys were sent to the oldest and most prestigious boys’ boarding school in Sydney—the King’s School, a school where many sons of the old landed families went. It was, like all boys’ boarding schools, modeled on Thomas Arnold’s muscular Christianity. My parents were intent on giving their children the best of the world they knew. They didn’t realize that it was hard for bush children to make the transition to the city, and that the contingent of country boys in the school, many of them sons of landed rich, saw no reason to work hard intellectually. They expected to go back home to a cheerfully horsey life on the land. My mother cherished dreams of her sons becoming lawyers or doctors. My father wanted them to find a secure place in the world, and dreamed that one of them would take over a much enlarged Coorain from him. Intent on establishing their sons securely within Australia’s class-conscious society, they pined at the separation, but knew it was for the best.
The combination of the 1939–1945 War and my brothers’ departure for boarding school meant that I was alone at Coorain with my parents. Single young men from the backcountry were always the first to volunteer for military service. By 1940, the few station hands available worked on the larger stations where there was company and some after-hours sociability. After Japan joined the Axis powers and entered the war in 1941, all able-bodied men were drafted, and there was total manpower control of all adult women and men. My father, a war veteran, with injuries and heart problems we were told resulted from being gassed in the 1914–1918 War, could have requested help for an essential primary producing industry. He and my mother were intensely patriotic and it was a matter of pride for them to manage alone. Each of us contributed to the war effort as best he or she could. Our contribution would be to work longer and harder. The job of running Coorain itself became harder as we began to experience the effects of the war. Australia produced no gasoline, and the produce of the oil wells and rubber plantations of Southeast Asia was diverted to Europe to meet the wartime priorities of motorized armies. After gasoline rationing was introduced, we went back to an earlier transportation era. Everything took more time. Picking up the twice-weekly mail on the dusty main highway four miles from the house took several hours. Going to the post office seven miles away was a morning’s expedition. Traveling the twenty-odd miles to work with sheep or tend the bores and water troughs at the far end of our odd-shaped property meant rising at 4:00 a.m. to put in the hours of riding necessary to get there to start work before the heat of the day. We saved our meager ration of gasoline for essentials, going forty miles to the nearest store in the railroad town of Ivanhoe, meeting the train when the boys came home from school. A reserve was necessary for emergencies: bushfires, a broken arm, a wound needing stitches.
After the first shock of the boys’ departure, my loneliness was moderated by the arrival of a fascinating new companion. The expanded size of Coorain meant that my father could hire a man who was a mine of bush lore and knowledge to put down a bore to provide a plentiful water supply for the Coorain homestead. Bob McLennan, universally known as old Bob, was not fazed by the lack of gasoline to power his well-drilling equipment. He had drilled many bores by hand in his long lifetime, and was quite ready to begin again. I watched intently as his auger was produced, the hole begun and steadily deepened as old Bob paced around in a circle, like some medieval figure on a treadmill. Since his task required slow movement, he had plenty of breath left to answer the questions of a curious child. We would find the first water at twenty feet, he said. It would be salty, and useless for our purposes. As each layer of soil came up, he explained about its place in the formation of the earth. We should find good water after about one hundred and twenty feet, he thought—that was unless we struck stone, which would mean the sweet, fresh water was deeper underground. We both tasted the water at twenty feet, and agreed that it was very salty. At forty-eight feet, another stream was crossed, equally metallic in taste. Soon after, very interesting things began to come up with each return of the drilling equipment to the surface: gravel, shale, slimy black oily-looking mud. Bob began to look troubled. The going was getting harder, and the chances were increasing that he would hit rock. At ninety feet, there it was, solid and desperately hard to drill. Bob was philosophical, pacing steadily, but his auger now made a few inches a day. My parents joked that perhaps he would be in residence with us till retirement. Months of work and wages had been invested and it was too late to abandon this effort and choose another site. Many weeks later Bob was through his six feet of granite, and the water found at one hundred and twenty feet was sent away for testing. He and I had done a lot of tasting and shaking our heads over it. It was not very clear, and after we had carefully measured the flow, it was less than a hundred gallons an hour. Bob said it wouldn’t do, but my father, hoping the job, now much more extended than he’d planned, would be completed, sent the water to the assayers anyway. The answer proved Bob’s point. It was not fit for human consumption. It contained too much salt, traces of gold, a minute quantity of lead sulfate. So Bob resumed his slow pacing. He was a slight bony man, small in stature, slow and deliberate in all his movements, endlessly talkative. He kept the same pace in heat or cold, and he respected the earth he worked with. He called the earth “she,” and he personified the hole he was drilling, now of epic proportions, and his auger. “Now we’ll see what the bastard has to offer,” he would say, winding his winch furiously to pull up the next load of earth. The mechanics of drilling were endlessly interesting to me. As the hand drill ate away the earth, metal casing was pushed down inside the hole. As the hole deepened, casing of a smaller and smaller size was pushed down inside the original. This provided the firm outer casing for the bore, within which piping and a water pump would eventually be installed. Bob began with casing of a monumental size “in case the bugger’s really deep,” he explained cheerfully. As each new piece of casing was driven into the earth and the next piece attached, a few inches of the original would protrude, requiring slicing off to make the joins even. These round wheels of metal became my toys, each succeeding size being delivered to me as a gift by Bob. It seemed that I had a family of them, all in neatly descending ages and sizes. I knew too few people to name them after actual acquaintances, but eventually I hit upon calling them after the various leaders of the Allies, both political and military. I knew who all of them were because I went regularly with my father to collect the mail, and he had me read the front page of each issue of the Sydney Morning Herald to him on the slow return journey from the mailbox. I named the amplest and most impressive circle of metal Winston Churchill, and a smaller but nonetheless impressive one, General de Gaulle.
Possessing in these toys a perfect symbolic system for rep
resenting hierarchy, I named a very modest one after the Prime Minister of Australia, thereby recognizing a set of power relationships I could not then have articulated. These pieces of metal were assembled to mimic the Quebec Conference, and a new character, larger than de Gaulle but noticeably smaller than Churchill, was introduced, President Roosevelt. The fortunes of war had already required regular reorganization of the rank order, my need after the battle of El Alamein being for a General Montgomery, second in size only to Churchill.
One day, more than six months after old Bob began his labors, my father and I returned from an afternoon expedition to see old Bob, a beatific smile on his face, rolling a sample of water around in his mouth as though it were vintage claret. As we approached, he spat it out and said, “It’s beautiful water, Mr. Ker, and she’ll pump thirty thousand gallons a day.” The assayers agreed on the quality, and time proved him right about the flow, which never faltered in the driest seasons. We never knew how many hundreds of miles he had tramped in his months of labor, but he wore out three pairs of boots and one steel auger. The equipment for the windmill and storage tank had already been purchased in anticipation of the moment. Shortly, a fifty-foot steel windmill tower and a forty-thousand-gallon tank on a thirty-foot stand towered beside our house.
The arrival of the water wrought miracles. My mother, freed of cooking for two hungry boys and a governess, raced through the household chores to work for three or four hours after lunch in her garden. The soil was fertile, there was ample fertilizer from the horses, cattle, and sheep, and the blessed water proved to contain only a little limestone which most plants flourished on. My father built a high windbreak, made of cane grass which grew on the property, to shield her seedlings from the hot winds. Inside it she produced a vision of paradise fit for a sultan’s courtyard. In front of the house were perennial beds, lining the verandas. Two perfectly balanced rectangles of green lawn were laid out, framed by long, thin rectangular beds for annuals. To the south of the house was the vegetable garden, and to the north the citrus orchard. The northern side of the cane windbreak became a trellis for grapes, and a little to the northwest was the potato bed.
The Road from Coorain Page 4