My brothers were summoned home two weeks early from school, though to help with what was not clear. There was pitifully little to do on Coorain. There were the same burlap troughs to mend, the same desperate animals to feed, but the size of the task was shrinking daily. The December heat set in, each day over 100 degrees. Now so much of our land was without vegetation that the slightest breeze set the soil blowing. Even without the dust storms, our daily life seemed lived in an inferno.
My mother’s efforts to rouse my father were indefatigable. One Saturday in early December was to be a meeting of the Pastures Protection Board in Hillston. Early in the week before, she set about persuading him to drive the seventy-five miles with his close friend Angus Waugh. Reluctantly, he agreed. The Friday before, a minor dust storm set in, and he decided against the drive. It was fearfully hot, over 108 degrees, and we passed a fitful evening barricaded in against the blowing sand.
The next morning I awoke, conscious that it was very early, to find my father gazing intently at me. He bent down to embrace me and said good-bye. Half asleep, I bid him good-bye and saw his departing back. Suddenly, I snapped awake. Why is he saying good-bye? He isn’t going anywhere. I leapt out of bed, flung on the first clothes to hand, and ran dry-mouthed after him. I was only seconds too late. I ran shouting after his car, “I want to come. Take me with you.” I thought he saw me, but, the car gathering speed, he drove away.
Back in the house, my mother found me pacing about and asked why I was up so early in the morning. I said I’d wanted to go with my father, and wasn’t sure where he went. He was worried about the heat and the adequacy of the water for the sheep in Brooklins (a distant paddock), she said, and had gone to check on it. It was a hot oppressive day, with the wind gaining strength by noon. I felt a leaden fear in my stomach, but was speechless. To speak of my fears seemed to admit that my father had lost his mental balance. It was something I could not say.
His journey should not have taken more than two hours, but then again he could have decided to visit other watering places on the property. When he was not home by two, my mother and Bob set out after him. Neither Barry nor I, left behind, was inclined to talk about what might have happened. Like a pair of automatons, we washed the dishes left from lunch and settled in to wait. When no one returned by four, the hour when my mother stoked the stove and began her preparations for dinner, we went through the motions of her routine. The potatoes were peeled, peas shelled, the roast prepared, the table laid.
Eventually, Bob arrived home alone. There had been an accident, he said. He must make some phone calls and hurry back. We neither of us believed him. We knew my father was dead. Finally, at six o’clock, the old grey utility my father drove hove into sight driven by my brother Bob; my mother’s car followed, with several others in its wake. She took the time to thank us for preparing dinner before saying she had something to tell us alone. We went numbly to our parents’ bedroom, the place of all confidential conversations. “I want you to help me,” she said. “Your father’s dead. He was working on extending the piping into the Brooklins dam. We found him there in the water.” My eyes began to fill with tears. She looked at me accusingly. “Your father wouldn’t want you to cry,” she said.
We watched woodenly as my father’s body was brought to rest in that same bedroom. We were dismissed while she prepared it for the funeral which would take place in two days. In the hot summer months, burials had to be speedy and there was no need for anyone to explain why to us children. We had been dealing with decaying bodies for years. Because of the wartime restrictions on travel and the need for haste, there was little time to summon family and friends. Telegrams were dispatched but only my mother’s brother and sister-in-law, close to us in Sydney, were actually expected. Eventually, we sat down to dinner and choked over our food, trying desperately to make conversation with the kindly manager from a neighboring station who had come to help. The meal seemed surreal. The food on the plate seemed unconnected to the unreal world without my father in it in which I now lived. I was haunted by the consciousness of his body lying close by in the bedroom, which my mother had sternly forbidden me to enter.
After we went sleeplessly to bed, we heard a sound never heard before, the sound of my mother weeping hopelessly and inconsolably. It was a terrible and unforgettable sound. To moderate the heat we slept on a screened veranda exposed to any southern breeze which might stir. My brother Barry’s bed was next to mine. After listening to this terrible new sound, we both agreed that we wished we were older so that we could go to work and take care of her. We tossed until the sun rose and crept out of bed too shocked to do more than converse in whispers.
My mother soon appeared, tight-lipped and pale, somehow a ghost of herself. Dispensing with all possibility of discussion, she announced that Barry and I were to stay with friends for a few days. She did not want us to see our father buried, believing that this would be too distressing for us. Though we complied without questioning the plan, I felt betrayed that I would not see him to his last rest. She, for her part, wanted to preserve us from signs of the body’s decay. As we set out, driven by the kindly Morison family, who had cared for me during my mother’s illness, we passed the hearse making its way toward Coorain. Its black shape drove home what had happened.
How my father’s death had actually come about we would never know. He was a poor swimmer, and had attempted to dive down in muddy water to connect a fresh length of pipe so that the pump for watering the sheep could draw from the lowered water level of the dam. It was a difficult exercise for a strong swimmer, and not one to undertake alone. Why he had chosen to do it alone when my two brothers, both excellent swimmers, were at home, we could not understand. I did not tell anyone of his early morning visit to me. I realized that we would never know the answer to the question it raised.
Everyone expected that my mother would sell Coorain, move to the city, and allow a bank or trust company to manage our finances. In our part of the world this was what widows did. Our circle of friends and advisers did not bargain for my mother’s business sense and her strong will. She would not sell the property when it was worth next to nothing. She planned instead to run it herself, wait for the rains which must come, and manage our one asset for our maximum benefit. The boys were to return to school according to the usual schedule. She would hire some help, and she and I would remain at Coorain. Presented with this plan and a request to finance it, her startled woolbrokers remonstrated with her about the hazards of a woman taking charge of her own affairs. Seeing her resolve, they acquiesced, and offered her a loan secured by our now virtually nonexistent sheep. So she returned resolute to preserve and enhance the enterprise she and my father had built.
He had not been a man to give much thought to transferring property to wife or children, and so my mother, as his sole heir, became liable for sizable death duties. Some of my first lessons in feminism came from her outraged conversations with the hapless valuation agent sent to inventory and value the assets of the estate for probate. She was incensed to discover that her original investment in furniture, linen, silver, and household equipment was now merged in my father’s estate. No value was attributed either to the contributions she had made to the enterprise through the investment of her capital fifteen years before, or to the proceeds of her fifteen years of twelve- and fourteen-hour days of labor. Her outspoken anger cowed the man into some concessions, but her rumblings about this economic injustice continued for years, and instructed me greatly.
Heroic as she was, we would not have fared so well in her defiance of the fates had we not been given the affection, support, and physical presence of my mother’s younger brother and his wife. Both worked in essential wartime occupations in Sydney, my uncle as an engineer and my aunt as the senior nurse in a munitions factory. Informed of my father’s death, both requested leave to attend his funeral and to help his widow cope with her loss, and both were refused any more than forty-eight hours’ absence. In characteristic Australian
fashion, they defied the manpower authorities, talked their way onto the train for the west despite the restrictions on civilian travel, and arrived to stay shortly before my father’s funeral.
Once they took in the situation my mother faced, they decided to defy the orders they promptly received to return to their respective jobs. Instead, they elected to see her through the harsh first months of bereavement. Their warm hearts, wonderful common sense, and comforting physical presence reassured us children, as my mother grew suddenly thinner, her abundant hair grey almost overnight, and her moods, normally equable, swung to every point of the compass. We struggled through Christmas, trying to celebrate, but at every point in the day we met memories of my father’s presence the previous year. At the end of January, the boys left for school, and in late February, my uncle finally obeyed the accumulating pile of telegrams and official letters requiring him to return at once to his wartime post. My aunt remained another month, a calming presence, full of life force, cheerfully sustaining our spirits by her questions about our way of life in a remote part of the country she had never visited. Before my uncle left, our former helper Ron Kelly returned, leaving a much better job to take care of Coorain and us once again.
By the time he arrived, we were feeding only seven or eight hundred sheep in two paddocks, and working to preserve the various improvements, bores, wells, sheepyards, and fences from the encroaching sand. Each day, the three of us went out with our loads of wheat, and to work on the now hated burlap troughs. They were hateful because they had become tattered with much use, and required daily attention with patches, twine, and bag needle. There was no way to make the repairs except to sit down in the dust, thread one’s needle, and go at it. With the sun beating down, no hands free to drive away the flies, and the sounds of the ever-hungry and opportunistic cockatoos waiting to tear apart our handiwork, we could not escape awareness of the repetitious and futile nature of our labors.
Each afternoon, Ron set out for another tour of fences: to dig out those sanding up, to treat posts being attacked by white ants under the sand, and to oil and care for all the working parts of the windmills and pumping equipment. At night after the lamps were lit, the silence in the house was palpable. My mother and I read after dinner, but as the time approached for going to bed she would become unaccustomedly nervous and edgy. She found sleeping alone a nightmare, and after a few weeks of sleepless nights she said she needed my company in her bed. After that it was I who had trouble resting, for she clung to me like a drowning person. Alone, without my father, all her fears of the wilderness returned, and she found the silence as alienating as when she first arrived on the plains. She would often pace the verandas much of the night. Both of us would be grateful for the dawn.
Once a week our friend and neighbor Angus Waugh drove the fifty miles to visit us. He would talk over the state of the sheep and the land with my mother, offer sound advice, and try to make her laugh. I longed for his visits so that for even a few hours the care of this silent and grieving person would not rest only on my shoulders. He could always make me laugh by telling wild nonsense stories, or wickedly funny accounts of the life and affairs of distant residents in the district. My mother, in fact, knew in great detail every aspect of the management of a sheep station. Angus knew this very well, but his weekly presence gave her some adult company, and enabled him to keep a watchful and sensitive eye on how we both were faring.
In February, although my mother was uncertain whether she could afford it, the shearing contractor and his team arrived to crutch our sheep. They followed the bush code of helping those in trouble, and told my mother to pay them when she could, or never if it wasn’t possible. Help appeared from all quarters at crutching time, and our few poor sheep were back in their paddocks before we knew it. My friends on the team never spoke of our bereavement, but they were even more than usually kind about my efforts to keep on top of everything that was happening at the shed.
By the time the boys came home for their holidays in May it was clear that very few of the animals would survive even if it rained within a few weeks. My brothers shot the few remaining large animals we could not feed—the Black Angus bull, formerly the rippling black embodiment of sexual power and energy, now a wraith; the few poor cows; some starving horses. And then in the next weeks the last sheep began to die by the hundreds. We would pile up the carcasses of those that died near the house, douse them with kerosene, and set them alight, to reduce the pervasive odor of rotting flesh. The crows and hawks were fat, and the cockatoos full-breasted on their diet of wheat, but one by one all other forms of life began to fade away.
After the boys went back to school in June, there was little to do on the place. No amount of digging could prevent the silting-up of fences, and the maintenance of equipment did not require much oversight. Once we were alone again, I was more than usually worried about my mother, because she ate next to nothing, fell to weeping unexpectedly, and seemed much of the time in a trance. The effort expended in getting up and carrying on each day exhausted her. This was combined with the effort expended in refusing to accept the possibility that our enterprise at Coorain might go under. Because this fear was repressed, she was fearful of lesser things. Once when I went riding without telling her, her fury startled me. Once when I went to work on a bore with Ron, an individual who would have died to secure our safety, she gave me a tongue-lashing about never again working alone with him.
Shortly after these explosions, Angus arrived for one of his visits. He took a walk with me and asked how we were doing. As I shook my head, uncertain about how to say what was on my mind, he supplied the words for me. “You’re worried about your mother, aren’t you,” he said. I nodded. “She doesn’t eat?” “That’s right,” I said. “She’s depressed?” I nodded. “You ought to leave here,” he said. “There’s not a bloody thing you two can do here now. The pair of you look like something out of Changi and it’s to no purpose. Would you like to leave, live like a normal child and go to school?” I felt a great wave of relief. “Yes,” I said.
That night Angus talked to my mother as they took a walk around the house and grounds. I heard snatches, and realized that he was playing the other side of the argument skillfully. “You can’t keep Jill here forever. It’s not right. She should be in school. Neither of you can do anything here. Look at her. She’s so skinny she could come from a concentration camp. It’s time to leave and go to Sydney, and let her get on with her life. You can hire a manager to take care of this place, and I’ll watch over it for you.”
The next morning my mother eyed me as though I were a stranger. I was certainly a sight. I was in my eleventh year, so underweight my clothes for an eight- or nine-year-old hung on me, and as Angus said, I looked worried enough to be an old woman. Once she noticed my appearance the matter was settled for my mother. She began to make plans for us to leave.
With Angus’s help we found a splendid manager. Geoff Coghlan was a thoroughly knowledgeable man about sheep and cattle, and the ways of our western plains country. He had been too young to participate in the 1914–1918 War, and a few years too old to join the armed forces in the 1939–1945 War, then wending toward Allied victory in Europe, and more slowly toward the defeat of Japan in the Pacific. Margaret, his wife, was the daughter of near neighbors, and Coorain offered them a home of their own. Given that my mother would live in Sydney, where I could attend a good school, our new managers would have relative independence to run things their way. It was agreed that they would move to Coorain early in August 1945, and we would depart close to the end of the month.
The actual prospect of departure evoked complicated emotions. The house, the garden, the vistas of space were the only landscape I knew. The ways of the backcountry were second nature, and I associated Sydney with stiff formal clothes, sore feet, and psychological exhaustion from coping with unaccustomed crowds. Yet I knew I could not deal unaided with my mother’s grief and despair. As time passed, the energy she had summoned to manage the
immediate details of life after my father’s death was dissipated, and she sank into a private world of sorrow from which I could not detach her. I was lonely and grief-stricken myself. I had come to hate the sight of the desolate countryside, the whitening bones, and the all-pervasive dust. I, too, was consumed with anxiety because the experience of cumulative disaster had darkened my mood, and made me see the fates as capricious and punishing.
Yet to leave Coorain was almost beyond my comprehension. Each day I prepared myself for the departure by trying to engrave on my memory images that would not fade—the dogs I loved best, the horse I rode, the household cat, the shapes of trees. Ever since my father’s death I had called his figure and voice to mind each morning as I woke, determined not to let it fade. Now I did the same with each familiar detail of life. It was strange to hear my mother and Mrs. Coghlan discuss what equipment should stay at Coorain, what china and glass should go with us. The familiar shapes of pots and pans, the patterns on the china—all took on a life of their own. Hitherto they had been simple aspects of the world that was.
Before we left, we made a visit to Clare Station, some fifty miles to the west, to spend two nights with Angus, his sister Eileen, and his younger brother Ron. Their parents had taken up a vast acreage in the 1880s, moving out onto the plains driving their sheep before them, transporting their belongings in bullock wagons. Clare, as they had named their property, had once been larger than its current five hundred thousand acres. It had been so large it was virtually a small town, with such extensive stables and accommodations that it could comfortably serve as a stop for the Cobb and Company coaches which traveled the west before the railroad and the automobile. The second generation of the Waughs were a formidable Scottish clan, thrifty, hardworking, generous, excellent businessmen. I had never seen anything at once so large and at the same time so haphazard. The station homestead was organized around a courtyard, three sides of which were bedrooms and bathrooms, arranged in no order I could discern. One walked across a second courtyard to the vast dining room, itself a good five-minute walk from the kitchens, set well away in case of fire. Everyone laughed about the fact that this inconvenient distance made the meals always lukewarm, but no one seemed to mind. The furniture was massive, leather-covered sofas and oak chairs surrounded the fireplaces in two adjoining sitting rooms. Huge gilt-framed landscapes of Scottish scenes adorned the walls. These I studied carefully, having never seen real paintings on canvas, let alone pictures of such unfamiliar highland sheep and cattle. Scattered over the faded linoleum floors were Oriental rugs. Things were well worn but clearly no one fretted over polishing them the way my mother did. Before dinner, everyone drank Scotch neat. Water was regarded as harmful to the taste. Angus told me his parents had still toasted “the king over the water” in his childhood, and that he remembered the rooms decorated with tartans. The woolshed was massive, like the house and its contents. The shed was large enough to shear what had once been a herd of forty thousand sheep. Everything—quarters for station hands, stables, yards, sheds for farm equipment—seemed on a gargantuan scale to me, just as the vast paintings of highland landscapes seemed to dwarf the people in the living rooms. I loved to hear Angus tell stories about the pioneering days of his parents, and the way of life before railways and cars made such city comforts as store-bought canned goods accessible. Clare had experienced the same disasters as we had at Coorain, but ten lean years made little difference to the family fortune. On a station of this size, one could wait out the seasons with relative composure.
The Road from Coorain Page 8