An Alice Girl

by Tanya Heaslip

  And we were lucky. We had Mum.

  She couldn’t control or change Dad. But she could love us all ‘to the moon and back’, which is what she told us she did, kissing us ‘all better’ and making us happy again whenever we needed comforting and cheering up.

  Finally, the great moment arrived.

  The baby we had longed to see and hold and have in our family was nearly here. Mum went back to hospital and was gone for over a week. Nana Parnell came up to look after us, given Miss Clarke was so busy teaching us. The waiting was horrible, but Nana Parnell spoiled us as she always did, and Miss Clarke kept us in line.

  Finally, one day Dad came home, and for the first time in a long time, he was grinning.

  ‘You have a baby brother.’

  ‘When can we see him? When can we see Mummy?’ we chorused, desperate to meet our new baby brother and see Mum. We were missing her so much, especially Brett.

  Dad drove us in to the hospital the next day after school. We were so excited, we could hardly breathe. The maternity ward was breezy, bordered by a large veranda. Mum met us on the veranda wearing a beautiful lemon nightie and housecoat, with lace all over it. She was smiling and threw her arms around us all.

  ‘You look so beautiful, Mummy,’ we said. ‘We miss you. When are you coming home?’

  We crowded around her, smothering her face with grubby kisses, and then begged to see the new baby. But he was sleeping in the ward full of babies and we were only allowed to peep through a gauze screen. It was hard to make anything out but lots of little lumps under blankets in cots. So, we trudged home again, desperate for both mother and baby to join us.

  The waiting became even harder, but then the day came for Dad to drive in to pick up Mum and the new baby. We had to do school that morning, and the hours ticked by so slowly until finally we were free for lunch and then, just as we’d started eating, we heard Dad’s Land Rover. We rushed to the back door, abandoning plates and cutlery, and there were Dad and Mum, carrying a white bassinet.

  They put down the bassinet by the back door. Clutching Mum’s legs, we peered in at the soft little face under a blue satin rug.

  ‘His name is Benny,’ announced Mum. ‘Short for Benjamin Frank Heaslip.’

  We all drew in breaths of awe and admiration.

  Brett was the first to speak. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said gently to the baby.

  Then he looked up at us and announced, ‘I’m going to call him darling.’

  Benny was a wonderful arrival for us all, especially after the past few months. Having a new baby in the house was like having our very own puppy or kitten or poddy calf to play with. Only much better, because he was one of us, and didn’t have to go out at night into a kennel or yard. We loved him, and adored him, thought he must be the most wonderful baby in the whole world, picked him up constantly, kissed his cherubic cheeks, and took him everywhere with us in his bassinet.

  ‘How long until he can talk?’ I asked Mum one day. That was the downside of a baby, we’d discovered—we chatted away constantly to him but he didn’t answer, except in burbles and gurgles, and sometimes smiles. All very gorgeous but we wanted him to talk.

  ‘A while,’ said Mum. ‘It will take a while.’

  None of us understood the concept of patience but we soon worked out that babies could communicate very well, even without words. Crying? Pick him up, cuddle him, kiss him, give him a bottle. Laughing? The same, except for the bottle. We all loved him from the very first moment and he quickly became my responsibility.

  Perhaps because I was the eldest, I wanted to look after him. Once Mum recovered, she was back to looking after the mob, and glad to have extra help. After all, I was seven by now and considered responsible. I loved doing it. I felt important and useful, and it also gave me unlimited access to Benny’s round cheeks, which I couldn’t resist kissing.

  We loved everything about our new arrival.

  11

  Loss

  By now, I was regularly getting gold stars for my reading and writing. I spent every spare moment learning to write cursive, making up my own stories, and reading adventure tales.

  Mum brought home more and more boxes of books from the School of the Air. Every time she went to town, she and Mrs Hodder would put together a compilation for me. As well as the Magic Faraway Tree books, Mrs Hodder introduced me to the Famous Five and The Secret Seven. Every time Mum arrived home from town, I would rush to greet her, struggle to carry the boxes to the back veranda and dive into them. It was like Christmas.

  There would be beautiful hardback books, with drawings of children on the cover in wonderful English-looking clothes (hats, scarves, gloves), with equally exciting titles—The adventures of … The mystery of … The hidden/secret of …—and each promised hours of breathtaking, page-turning wonder. When I opened the books, the pages were yellow and smelled deliciously musty. I couldn’t wait to devour them, impatient to finish school so I could escape. I read everything I could get my hands on.

  Miss Clarke encouraged both my reading and writing, which included composition stories. These were a peculiar blend of English and Australian-isms, and Mum started to worry when I refused to write paddock in stories and used field instead.

  ‘Tanya, my darling,’ she would say. ‘We live in Australia. In the outback. We have paddocks. That’s the proper word.’

  But I didn’t agree. I thought paddock a particularly ugly word, denoting areas that were usually dry, stony, red or brown, and dusty. Fields, on the other hand, suggested stretches of soft, green landscape, golden with daffodils, bordered by green woods. And in those places, there would likely be children and fairyfolk and exciting adventures. I happily blended my two worlds of reality and imagination and saw nothing strange in that at all.

  The more I read and dreamed of England and Europe, the more they seemed as real to me as my own home. My images were as vivid as if I were there. The old Aboriginal women had taught me the pleasure of walking through the bush, and I’d been wandering around and telling myself stories since I was a little girl. I could spend hours in my imagination, because it was where I was happiest.

  Dad spent lots of time in the bush, too, but for different reasons.

  He was busy building a good herd of Poll Herefords, and they required constant checking. He couldn’t have too many cattle, because drought was always just over the horizon, or too few, because there had to be enough to breed in order to sell. A bit like Goldilocks, the numbers had to be just right.

  But before long, he was talking about another problem.

  ‘Pastoral leases in the Territory don’t give us enough security,’ he said, firmly.

  He spoke in the way people did when they were completely right about something, giving no one a chance to say anything different. Besides, if Dad said it, it would be right. Dad was never wrong. He knew about these things.

  ‘We need to borrow money to make improvements but it’s hard to persuade the banks when we have such a weak form of land tenure.’ The way he used the word weak, it sounded like something disgusting. I always felt a bit sick in my stomach at this point.

  ‘We need stronger lease terms in our favour,’ he’d pace up and down, ‘otherwise we could lose everything we put in. Yes, we were prepared to take that risk to get Bond Springs in the first place, but it’s not sustainable long-term.’

  I didn’t understand all his words, but the meaning was clear. Yet again, we were facing big worries. Hanrahan of ‘We’ll all be rooned’ fame would no doubt have agreed.

  ‘Why are we pastoral lease-holders prejudiced by such onerous, unsupportive terms, when landholders down south aren’t? It’s double standards and wrong.’

  I chewed my lip.

  ‘Freehold, that’s what we need,’ he pointed into the air, as though if he could just grab that elusive thing, every problem in the world would be solved. ‘The bloody bureaucrats won’t agree, but at least they should give us more control over our future. Trouble is, they just don’t un
derstand what private industry needs—a fair go.’

  Dad was so worried about our future that he joined with a group of cattlemen and they lobbied the government for better, stronger lease terms.

  They didn’t get them, but the group went on to become the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association and Dad was its first chairman. He worked for years to try to improve conditions for those on the land. And while he did finally get improved lease terms, freehold was ‘never going to be a happening thing’, as Mum would say.

  Bloody bureaucrats.

  Even though I understood none of the detail, to my ears it seemed that the governments were completely against us, and always looking for ways to bring us down. That meant that our life on the land was always at risk. You could never relax. You had to always be vigilant (another word I’d learnt from Dad), ever ready for the next disaster.

  As the eldest child, I felt both responsible and powerless. I wanted to protect Mum and M’Lis, Brett and Benny from these things, because they seemed equally powerless, but I had no way of doing that. Nor did I have the words to describe my fears or what I could or should do about them.

  So, I didn’t talk about my worries with anyone. I stuffed them deep down inside and built a picture inside me that grown-up life was a difficult and dangerous business. And I knew I was lucky to still be a child for a while yet.

  Being with Mum helped me forget my worries. She had a lightness and gaiety about her, despite Dad’s many deep-held anxieties. Her eyes were so warm. She could solve all problems with kisses and hugs.

  Her idea of relaxation was coming home from Alice with the latest Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, and devouring stories of ‘life on the outside’, with all its glamour and glitz and gossip. Under a ray of dull, yellow light, after a long day, she would sit up in the kitchen with a cup of tea and whip through the magazine pages before bed.

  ‘Keeps me going!’ she’d say with a smile, after catching up on the latest story about the Queen, or a sewing pattern, or a new recipe for beef.

  Whenever we weren’t at school, we had little time to ourselves. We were often squashed up in the back of the Land Rover while Dad did bore runs. Mum would send us off when we were driving her crazy, or when Dad needed help. M’Lis and Brett mostly enjoyed bore runs, but I hated them. Stuck in the heat and dust, getting carsick, with no books, was like a prison sentence for me. Especially because Dad could literally drive all day.

  Baby Benny received real praise in Dad’s diary one day: ‘Benny with me all day on bore run.’ Benny was nine months old.

  When M’Lis, Brett and I had time to ourselves, we continued to live in our happy imaginary world. We played chasey, ran around with the dogs, or talked to the poddy calves, or put on song and dance performances on the lawn. We lugged Benny in his bassinet everywhere and spent hours cuddling, carrying and kissing him. We were each other’s best friends.

  Down at the creek, the wonderful, old stone wall was falling down. It was the perfect place to play games and spend warm winter days on the old flat stones. A little further down on the other side of the creek was a deep, off-limits well. It was said that somebody had once fallen down there and died. Whether or not that was true, we were terrified and went nowhere near it.

  But we spent endless hours playing Cowboys and Indians around the wall. In its crumbling form, it provided wonderful spots to hide, and then jump unseen up on top and point an imaginary bow and arrow, shouting, ‘Die! Die!’ to the hapless ones still below. The top of the wall was home base and it gave a wide view of the old windmill on one side and the huge gum trees lining the riverbed on the other.

  Our Number One favourite game was creating little cattle stations out of sticks and stones in the dirt and making roads with our fingers. We squatted in the sand or around the old meat house, absorbed in our make-believe world for hours. We built dams and poured dribbles of water in them (they were never full, because we had rarely seen a dam that was full). The roads were a winding maze. The stockyards were built out of twigs. There were creeks, always dry, and bores made of stones.

  M’Lis and Brett saved their pocket money to buy little Matchbox cars and whizzed them around and across their labyrinth of roads. They built bridges of branches for their cars to mount and tunnels for them to drive under. Mostly, the cars got stuck in the branches and the tunnels collapsed, but nothing deterred M’Lis and Brett in their determination to beat each other to the finish line (there was always a race involved).

  When I wasn’t playing with M’Lis and Brett and Benny, or reading and writing, I was drawing and tracing pictures. Over time I started to put words to pictures, like the cartoons I’d read at the Braitlings’ house. The options for creativity seemed endless to me. Sometimes I’d just study words I found in Dad’s encyclopedias, the dictionary, Mum’s magazines and any fiction books I could lay my hands on. I’d write them down and make myself spell and pronounce them off by heart.

  Words were the key to my Aladdin’s cave.

  Being alone was a joyous thing to me. It rarely happened, because there were always jobs to complete, games to play and Benny to look after, but my idea of absolute happiness was being alone, daydreaming, lying on the lawn looking up at the big blue sky, reading my books and making up stories.

  In my imagination I could soar to places of joy and limitless freedom and endless hope. I could fly into a glorious weightless space of opportunities. There I was safe.

  Around this time, I also learned how it felt to lose someone you loved.

  M’Lis, Brett and I had already experienced the loss of animals. Death was part of the natural cycle of life. We lost little poddy calves to dingoes, we lost our dogs to snakebite, we lost cattle to drought. We went to get a killer with Dad every month when the station needed meat.

  But I’d never lost a person before. That was until Miss Clarke decided to marry a man from the Flinders Ranges, and said she had to leave us.

  We were devastated. We couldn’t believe she was going—we thought she would live with us forever. I think I was the most grief-stricken. I’d had the longest bond with Miss Clarke and I loved learning with her. She gave all of us support when Mum was so busy working. She was part of the routine and structure of our lives. I couldn’t imagine life without her kind, calming presence.

  The misery of losing Miss Clarke was slightly lessened when we were invited to her wedding. We knew that weddings were the most exciting thing in the world because the previous year our Aunty June (Dad’s younger sister) and Uncle John (Mum’s younger brother) had got married. Mum said, with a mischievous grin, she’d matchmade them, and M’Lis and I thought their wedding was a fairytale. So, whenever we were sad, Mum would say, ‘You’ll be able to see Miss Clarke in a wedding dress!’ and that cheered us up.

  We flew down in DQG for the big occasion and stayed at Witchitie. Miss Clarke’s wedding was to be held at the tiny Cradock Methodist Church, deep in the Flinders Ranges, where we four children had been christened.

  It was June, and cold. M’Lis and I wore exquisite blue velvet dresses with an equally exquisite fur collar and trim, white striped stockings and little boots. Nana Parnell had made our dresses, and we felt like little princesses (even though we were beaming through gaps in our little front teeth on the big day).

  It was joyous standing next to Dad and Papa Heaslip and hearing their beautiful voices singing the old Methodist hymns in harmony. It was always surreal to be taken out of our outback bush life to rural South Australia with its long-established religious and cultural traditions. There was something about coming back to the Flinders that made Mum and Dad’s faces light up, as they embraced their former life, and momentarily forgot the stresses and strains of running Bond Springs. Dad relaxed, looked young again. Mum beamed the whole time.

  Miss Clarke looked so beautiful, and her new husband was incredibly handsome. When she came over after the service and kneeled before us, she was a vision in white.

  ‘Make sure you work hard at school
and be good for Mummy and Daddy, won’t you?’

  She smiled and wiped away the tears under my eyes, and then left our lives.

  That night when we went back to Witchitie to stay, the first thing I did was rush to the schoolroom. I opened the door and fell on my knees to smell the lino, which I adored, and traced my hand over my desk. Even though I hadn’t been in that schoolroom for some years, my exercise books and pens and paper were still sitting there—as though it had only been yesterday I’d started learning about ‘Dick and Dora, Nip and Fluff ’ with Miss Clarke.

  There I said my own private, sad goodbye to her.

  I love you, Miss Clarke.

  12

  An Outback Lifeline

  After Miss Clarke’s wedding, we flew home in DQG with our new governess. She was also from country South Australia, and it was not a great trip.

  The new governess was given the luxury of the front seat next to Dad, but that meant Mum, M’Lis, Brett, Benny and I were squashed behind in a space built for three. We were two more people than the tiny plane was allowed to carry, but there was no other way for Dad to get his family and a governess up and back from the Territory in one trip.

  Not that Dad told anyone—and we weren’t allowed to either.

  Bloody bureaucrats.

  M’Lis and Brett got sick en route. I couldn’t hold on. Benny did more than his fair share of howling. Mum had to stop us all from fighting. The new governess—squashed in with all of this smelly chaos for eight hours—had despair in her eyes the closer we drew to our destination.

  Things did not improve when we got home and into the schoolroom. We were missing Miss Clarke (and certainly didn’t want a new governess). Brett was in his first year of school and couldn’t bear being stuck at a desk; he was a wild bush kid who just wanted to be active and outside. M’Lis wasn’t naughty, but she wanted to be outside too. While I was glad to be inside the schoolroom, I was sulky because the poor woman wasn’t Miss Clarke.