The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

  Often I came home to a novel situation. My mother might be out, visiting friends, spending time with her eighty-five-year-old mother, conferring with business advisers. With each day that passed in our new way of life, I could see her body relaxing. She was still haunted by grief at the past and by anxiety about the future, but the lines of tension disappeared from her body. She ate well, began to sleep more regularly, and relished the company of our hospitable landlady and her family. Friends came also to take her out to dinner, and I would watch with interest as she set out, the embodiment of elegance in her remaining stylish clothes, leftovers from her holidays in Sydney with my father in the thirties. On most days after I arrived home, we had a leisurely afternoon tea gazing at the Harbor, and then we read for an hour or so before dinner. My mother no longer read to educate herself, but for escape. Now the pile of books beside her chair came from a local lending library; they were the conventional romances and detective stories with which other housewives whiled away the hours. Without ever discussing it, we agreed that my time for children’s stories was over. Instead we relished the same detective stories and same spy stories, discovering who could identify the murderer or recognize the villain.

  My brothers arrived home regularly for weekends from boarding school. This was a new pleasure for us all. We began to enjoy one another’s companionship as children and adolescents rather than as busy workers at the never-ending tasks of Coorain. My brothers and I explored the neighborhood and the surrounding suburbs, orienting ourselves by scrambling around the shoreline from the beach closest to our house. We would return filled with stories about feats of climbing, or of inadvertent trespass on some grand beachfront property, and occasionally the wilder stories would make my mother laugh wholeheartedly.

  My brother Bob was usually the storyteller. Then in his last year at school, he was close to six feet tall and handsome in a striking way. His graceful and well-proportioned body radiated energy. His blue eyes blazed with intellect and zest for life, and they lit up a face remarkable for beauty and regularity of feature. His fair tanned skin and thick crop of golden hair made him appear clean and freshly dressed even at the conclusion of a particularly muddy Rugby game. He had grown to young manhood possessing a rare gentleness of spirit, along with fierce integrity, and a readiness to show his love of music and poetry even though the conventional male culture encouraged a laconic and aggressive masculinity. He was unaware of his physical beauty and cheerfully unassuming in his dealings with people. My mother adored him, as did his younger brother and sister.

  Like everyone in his generation at school, he had grown up expecting to volunteer at the earliest possible age for the R.A.A.F., as had his friends who left King’s a few years ahead of him. The sudden loss of my father, the end of the war in the Pacific, and our move to Sydney left him a little at sea about the immediate next stage in his life. All its expected patterns had been transformed into a new set of questions. For the moment, as we enjoyed the luxury of being together at leisure, he was ready to tease my mother lightheartedly about her old-fashioned ways. He made her listen to American popular music, provoked her by calling her Ma, instead of the hitherto required Mother, and insisted that some of her more Draconian rules for us younger children be relaxed.

  My brother Barry, at fifteen, had the same wonderful gentleness of character combined with strength of will and integrity. He had had less high-spirited fun at school than Bob. A mistaken medical opinion rendered early in his school career had convinced my mother that he should not be allowed to play sports. This was a real hardship in a school which revolved around athletics. Worse still, the bush child’s susceptibility to infections had really disadvantaged him in class, because of repeated absences and hardness of hearing brought about by neglected infections. He was thus more silent than Bob, and less ebullient in spirit, but as his transition from adolescence began we saw intimations of his later wiry frame, handsome lean features, and great concern for the care of others.

  Our life could be relatively carefree because my mother and I were still in transition, and the pressing questions of my brothers’ lives were deferred by the moratorium of their school years. My mother’s urge to control her offspring was not yet at odds with their development, and so our first months together in Sydney were golden. In the long run, if Coorain continued to produce no income, we could not afford our flat in the lovely house in Mosman, nor would we fit there at the end of the year when Bob finished his last year at boarding school. My mother’s careful choice of spacious rooms and wide vistas gave us an interlude of recuperation before facing up to some of the pressing problems presented by the drought and our father’s death.

  After eight weeks of daily battles with my shyness, I was released by the same bush child’s lack of immunity to infection which had plagued my brothers when they came to the city. On the way home from school one mild afternoon, I found myself stopping to rest at the top of each flight of stairs traversing the cliff along my route home. When I reached Stanton Road, our landlady, busy at dividing her Michaelmas daisies in the front garden of number 42, looked up to greet me and exclaimed “You’re very flushed. Come here and let me feel your forehead.” Testing my fever with an expert hand, she instructed me to go upstairs, lie down till she brought me tea, and then to wait keeping very warm until my mother arrived home. Doing as instructed, I noticed the room waving around and my teeth chattering, although I felt hotter than in the worst heat wave at Coorain.

  The doctor, quickly summoned by my mother on her return, announced that I had a streptococcal infection and, golden words, that I must be kept at home until my fever subsided. Subside it did not, and later in the week, straining to hear the lowered voices, I heard him tell my mother that I had pneumonia and pleurisy and must be hospitalized. She announced firmly that no special nurse or hospital staff could give a child better care than she could. My memory of her in the weeks that ensued is clear. She was a wonderful nurse, and a natural healer. She never tired, seemed never to sleep, and her close observation of her patient meant that she knew how I was feeling before I could tell her something hurt.

  My recovery was ensured when some of the new, miraculous sulfa drugs developed during the war were procured, and my fever abated as swiftly as it had come. My brothers had taken it in turns to come home from school on weekends to sit by my bed and read to me, and on my first weekend up we had a royal party. I liked being the invalid center of attention, especially as I had been freed from the daily ordeal of school.

  Even as she seemed preoccupied with caring for me, my mother was facing up to the realities of our situation. It had not rained at Coorain, and there was no likelihood of income from the place in the coming year. In only a few weeks, Bob would finish his final year at King’s, and some less expensive and more spacious quarters must be found to house us all. As soon as I could be left to amuse myself for the day, she set out answering advertisements for rooms in return for housekeeping, or for the care of an elderly or sick person. By the time I was putting in a final two weeks at Queenwood, she had found the opportunity she was seeking—half a house available in return for housekeeping and cooking for an elderly widower in the suburb of Waitara, some thirty minutes’ ride by train north of the city center on what we learned to call the North Shore.

  Waitara was our first introduction to the delights of Sydney suburbs, where the houses had gardens filled with native Australian plants and shrubs, and the air was permanently filled with the aroma of eucalyptus. We heard our first kookaburras there, learned the varieties of bottlebrush trees and boronias, and saw our first waratah in bloom. We were a tight fit into our half of the house, and it was soon apparent that my mother’s standards of housekeeping were too exacting for our landlord. He liked to have his friendly Corgi and Welsh terrier sleep in his room, and his amiable cat was free to roam the house. My mother, convinced that animals carried hazardous germs, was perpetually shooing them from the kitchen and surreptitiously cleaning the landlord’s room when
he wasn’t looking.

  Because Christmas recalled our father’s death, it was a difficult feast for us. Nevertheless, we had one of my mother’s succulent roast turkeys and her ambrosial plum puddings before the boys left to spend the rest of the summer at Coorain. During January, we began to talk seriously about where I would attend school. My mother was daunted by the prospect of more private school fees as our debts grew and our assets dwindled. Did I think I would like the local state school? she asked me. We could see it each time we took a train—it was right beside the railway station, empty at present, surrounded by an acre of unkempt ground. I was startled. I had taken on my parents’ values sufficiently to see this proposal as a distinct coming down in the world. Recognizing the worry in my mother’s eyes, I said I would.

  The first day of school in February was hot, 105 degrees. The school, a brick building with an iron roof, was like a furnace, and its inhabitants, teachers and students, wilted as the day wore on. I hated it from the moment I walked in the door. I was a snob, and I knew the accents of the teachers and most of the students were wrong by the exacting standards we’d had drummed into us at home. Worse still was the unruly behavior of everyone of every age. Boys pulled my hair when I refused to answer questions I took as rude or impudent; girls stuck out their tongues and used bad language. Teachers lost their tempers and caned pupils in front of the class. Few books were opened as the staff waged a losing battle to establish order. Recess and lunchtime were purgatorial. Crowds, or so it seemed to me, of jeering boys and a few girls gathered around to taunt me about my accent. “Stuck up, ain’t you,” they yelled, as I faced them in stubborn silence.

  They were right. Now I was in a more diverse social universe than I had known at Coorain. I had no idea how to behave or what the rules were for managing social boundaries. I had been friends, one could say special friends, with Shorty, or with Ron Kelly, but that was in a simple world where we each knew our respective places. Here, I knew only that the old rules could not possibly apply. Everyone around me spoke broad Australian, a kind of speech my parents’ discipline had ruthlessly eliminated. My interrogators could unquestionably be described by that word my mother used as a blanket condemnation of lower-class people, customs, and forms of behavior. They were “common.” My encounter was a classic confrontation for the Australia of my generation. I, the carefully respectable copier of British manners, was being called to raucous and high-spirited account by the more vital and unquestionably authentic Australian popular culture. I was too uncertain to cope. I faced them in silence till the bell rang and we returned to the pandemonium of the unruly classroom.

  After school, the same group assembled to escort me home to the accompaniment of catcalls and vivid commentaries on my parentage. I knew these city children could not outlast someone who was used to walking ten or twelve miles a day behind a herd of sheep, so our comic crocodile set out. I, stalking in front in frozen indignation, my attendant chorus gradually wilting as I led them along hot pavements and across streets where the heat had begun to melt the tarmac. After the last one had tired and dropped away, I made my way home where my mother was ostentatiously doing nothing in the front-garden, on the watch for my arrival.

  We had our afternoon tea in blissful silence. Finally she asked me how the day had gone. “It was all right,” I said, determined not to complain. She studied my face thoughtfully. “You don’t have to go back,” she said. “I made a mistake. That’s not the right school for you.” Years later, I asked how she guessed what my day had been like. “I didn’t have to ask,” she said. “You were a child whose face was always alight with curiosity. When you came home that day, your face was closed. I knew you wouldn’t learn anything there.”

  In fact, had I persevered I would have learned a great deal, though little of it from the harassed and overworked teachers in the ill-equipped classrooms. I’d have been obliged to come to terms with the Australian class system, and to see my family’s world from the irreverent and often hilarious perspective of the Australian working class. It would have been invaluable knowledge, and my vision of Australia would have been the better for it. It was to take me another fifteen years to see the world from my own Australian perspective, rather than from the British definition taught to my kind of colonial. On the other hand, had I learned that earthy irreverence in my schooldays, it would have ruled out the appreciation of high culture in any form. My mother had no training for that appreciation, but she knew instinctively to seek it for her children. She did not reflect much about the underlying conflicts in Australian culture. She was simply determined that I would be brought up to abhor anything “common,” and that, despite her financial worries, I would have the best education available in the Australia she knew.

  The next day, my mother acted decisively. By some wizardry peculiarly hers, she persuaded the headmistress of Abbotsleigh, one of the most academically demanding of the private schools for girls in Sydney, to accept me as a pupil in the last year of the Junior School. Although there were long waiting lists for admission to the school, I was to begin at once, as a day girl, and become a boarder the next term.

  Before being formally enrolled, I was taken for an interview with Miss Everett, the headmistress. To me she seemed like a benevolent being from another planet. She was over six feet tall, with the carriage and gait of a splendid athlete. Her dress was new to me. She wore a tweed suit of soft colors and battered elegance. She spoke in the plummy tones of a woman educated in England, and her intelligent face beamed with humor and curiosity. When she spoke, the habit of long years of teaching French made her articulate her words clearly and so forcefully that the unwary who stood too close were in danger of being sprayed like the audience too close to the footlights of a vaudeville show. “She looks strapping,” she cheerfully commented to my mother, after talking to me for a few minutes alone. “She can begin tomorrow.” Thereafter, no matter how I misbehaved, or what events brought me into her presence, I felt real benevolence radiating from Miss Everett.

  The sight of her upright figure, forever striding across the school grounds, automatically caused her charges to straighten their backs. Those who slouched were often startled to have her appear suddenly behind them and seize their shoulders to correct their posture. Perhaps because she liked my stiff back we began a friendship that mattered greatly in my future. I never ceased to wonder at her, for Miss Everett was the first really free spirit I had ever met. She was impatient with bourgeois Australian culture, concerned about ideas, restless with the constraints of a Board of Trustees dominated by the low church evangelical Anglican archdiocese of Sydney, and she never bothered to conceal her feelings. She had been a highly successful amateur athlete, and had earned her first degree in French literature at the Sorbonne. After Paris, she had studied modern literature in Germany. To me and to many others, she was a true bearer of European cultural ideals in Australia. She loved learning for itself, and this made her a most unusual schoolteacher. The academic mentality in the Australia of my childhood focused on knowledge as a credential, a body of information one had to use as a mechanic would his tools. With her French training, she saw her academic task as one of conveying to her charges the kinds of disciplines which released the mind for creativity and speculation. This, to many of her peers, was a subversive goal. She was a successful headmistress because she was also an astute politician, bending before the winds of provincial prejudice whenever they blew strongly over issues of discipline and behavior. But it was characteristic of her that she made her mind up about flouting the waiting lists of daughters of old girls because she’d been struck during our ten minutes together by the range of my vocabulary. My mother and I had had a hard few years, she had remarked to get us started. “Yes,” I said, “we have lived through a great natural catastrophe.” She wanted eleven-year-olds who thought that way in her school and cheerfully ignored the admission rules.

  Thereafter, I hurried quickly past the desert of the local state school to the railway station
and rode the seven minutes south to Wahroonga, the suburb of my new school. On my path homeward, I only once saw my former attendant chorus ranging restlessly about the local state school grounds. Seeing me, they took flight like a flock of birds, alighting by the fence as I strode past. I was prepared for hostility, but they were remarkably genial. “We don’t blame you for leaving this fucking school, Jill,” the ringleader shouted cheerfully. “It’s no bloody good.” I was too young and insecure to wonder what a good school might have made of such high-spirited pupils, and I had as yet no sense of injustice that the difference between our chances for education were as night and day. At Abbotsleigh, even though I was immediately ushered into a classroom of thirty-six total strangers, it seemed as though I had already arrived in paradise. Many students were boarders from distant country areas who had also had to overcome their shyness and become social beings. At breaks between classes they understood my tongue-tied silence. I was placed at a desk next to one of the kindest and most helpful members of the class, and two girls were deputed to see to it that I was not lonely my first day. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. Better still, the teacher, Miss Webb, a woman in her late twenties, knew exactly when to put the class to work, and when to relax and allow high spirits to run relatively free. Our classroom was an orderly and harmonious place where the subjects were taught well and the students encouraged to learn. Even the strange ritual of the gymnasium was less puzzling. The teachers were used to bush children and took the time to explain what the exercises were for, or to tell me that I would soon learn the eye—hand coordination I lacked.

  Our curriculum was inherited from Great Britain, and consequently it was utterly untouched by progressive notions in education. We took English grammar, complete with parsing and analysis, we were drilled in spelling and punctuation, we read English poetry and were tested in scansion, we read English fiction, novels, and short stories and analyzed the style. Each year, we studied a Shakespeare play, committing much of it to memory, and performing scenes from it on April 23 in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday.