by Alan Tucker
To Deb, who gave me time and trust, and to the State Library of South Australia, who gave me information and a quiet space. AT
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
The Diary of Anthony Brown Woomera, 1953
HISTORICAL NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
About the Author
Copyright
The Diary of Anthony Brown
Woomera, 1953
Wednesday, 13 May 1953
Dad warned us we’d either love it or hate it here. Mum hates it. Or at least I think she does, because she’s done a mountain of grizzling since we arrived last Saturday. She hates the dust and the flies. And she hates that there are hardly any other women here. Dad said she’ll meet a few at the barbecue this weekend.
I love it. There are lots of kids my age. They’re friendly because they’re all fairly new to town. They don’t call Woomera a town. They call it ‘the village’.
Dave lives next door. He’s thirteen too. He started talking to me as soon as the removal truck pulled up at our new house. He wanted me to go and play but Mum said, ‘No’. I had to help unpack because Dad wasn’t around.
Dave got off on the wrong foot with Mum because she heard him whisper she was a grouch. After all the boxes were stacked in the house she let me go outside and play with Dave as long as I was sensible.
The first thing he said was, ‘Your legs are wonky’. Then he asked if I could run. I told him I could, but not very fast, so he suggested we go riding instead. I didn’t tell him Mum won’t let me ride bikes. I didn’t want him to think I was a sook. He loaned me his sister’s bike. I was wobbly because I hadn’t ridden for years. We didn’t go too far because I was very slow.
Mum doesn’t know I went riding. She’d cut crook if she knew.
I keep my secrets in this diary. I carried it with me on the bus. All of my other stuff is packed in the boxes. I’ve had few secrets from Mum for the past three months. She knows everything, because there was only the two of us in Townsville. Dad’s been here since February. He wasn’t living in a house. He lived in a tent.
I started writing a diary when I was stuck in a hospital bed for months. It helped fill the time as I recovered from polio. Lots of kids get polio. The virus paralyses some and kills others. Dad says I didn’t die because I inherited the Browns’ fighting bush spirit. Mum says it was because of her skilled nursing.
I don’t have polio now. And I’m not a cripple, but my legs are still not as good as they were. They’re getting stronger, though, and I’m happy with them.
Friday, 15 May
Dad got home last night. That made Mum less grumpy. He’s been to Adelaide to collect some rocket parts. They came from England. So did our house.
‘The government owns every brick and stick in the village,’ Dad told us. This is a better house than the one in Townsville. It’s brand-new, so I don’t know why Mum’s complaining. Dad likes the way she’s set up the kitchen. He’s got tomorrow off to help her shift the heavy furniture into the other rooms.
Dave and I went riding again today. I told him Mum will have a go at me if she sees me on a bike so he hides it around the corner.
He’s allowed to do anything he wants. His parents don’t care. Dad’s okay with me mucking about. Mum’s overprotective. Dad tells her to ease off on me but she won’t. She always says it’s all right for Dad because he doesn’t have to look after me when my legs go.
That hasn’t happened for ages.
Sunday, 17 May
The barbecue was good fun last night. Lots of kids were there. Now I’ll know some of the others in my class when school starts tomorrow. I have to be there early to enrol. I’ll be wearing long pants for the first time. That’ll be good. I’m sick of people staring at my bent legs.
I don’t think any of the kids noticed how slowly I ran last night when we played brandy in the dark. I often hid in the shadows so I didn’t have to run much. Mum told me I wasn’t allowed to play so I waited until she was talking and snuck off. Dad saw me and winked. He wants me to toughen up. He loves going bush and camping out but Mum hasn’t let him take me since I got polio.
That was six years ago. I wish she’d stop worrying.
Wednesday, 20 May
School’s all right. I’m the best drawer in the class. I knew I would be. I drew a picture of Superman flying. The teacher was amazed I could do it so well without copying. He doesn’t know how many drawings of Superman I’ve done in the past. When I was a kid I was obsessed with him. I’d love to fly like him. Can you imagine that? ZOOOOOOMING along up high, looking down on everyone. Maybe one day I will.
Woomera’s a good spot to learn about flying because they test rockets here. If they ever need someone small to put inside one and be fired off, I’ll volunteer. How good would that be? I’m not scared of tiny spaces and my wonky legs wouldn’t matter, because you can’t walk around inside a rocket.
Dave’s drawing was terrible. Because I finished mine quickly, I helped him. He was trying to draw an army tank. It looked more like a sardine can on wheels.
I had to rub most of it out and start again. Next art lesson we have to colour our drawings in. I’m not so good at colouring in, but I’m not bad. I’ve got my own Derwent pencils. Dave thinks I’m spoiled, but I reminded him I don’t have a bike and he does. Does that mean he’s spoiled too?
I got a good mark for an English essay describing my old house, but didn’t get too many maths answers right. That’s because I’ve missed too much school. I still did better than Dave.
Saturday, 23 May
I went out into the desert this arvo with Dave and his friend Robert. I didn’t tell Mum and Dad where we were going. Dave’s been in Woomera the longest. He arrived last year. He said it was terrible then because there weren’t any good kids to muck around with. He thinks it’s great now that more families have moved in. Robert’s been here since the start of the year.
He joked that I have ‘banana legs’. Dave told him not to pick on me or he’d stir him about his cowlick.
Robert wanted to know how long I’d had polio. I told him I don’t have it any more and one day soon I’ll be able to run and ride faster than either of them. I told Robert I could already thrash him in a swimming race. I did hours of swimming in the Townsville pool to strengthen my legs and help them straighten again.
The boys have lived all over Australia. That’s because Army families move all the time. My family would’ve moved more if I hadn’t got sick. Dad didn’t mind being based in Townsville during the war, but afterwards he said it was too much like the city. We had no choice but to stay there because of my polio. Dad’s a bushie. He wants me to be a bushie too.
We rode right out to a place in the desert the boys call The Grave. We couldn’t ride all the way because the sand was too soft. Dave’s seen a skeleton near there. We couldn’t find it. He said the wind must have covered it with sand again.
Robert dared one of us to dig up the skeleton in The Grave. It belonged to someone called John Henry Davies. He died sixty-nine years ago, in 1884. There wasn’t a town then, just desert. We wondered what he was doing way out here and whether he died of snake bite or thirst or was speared by Aborigines. When no-one took up his first dare Robert dared one of us to sleep out here alone one night. Dave joked, ‘No way. Not over my dead body.’
Woomera’s like a town in a cowboys-and-Indians movie. If it really was it would have a name like Dry Gulch or Dead Man’s City, there’d be big cactuses growing everywhere and we’d be riding horses instead of pushbikes. I don’t know what horses would eat out here. It’s dry enough in mid-winter, so I hate to think how dry it will get in the summer time.
The boys said t
he village has regular film nights. Robert said he saw High Noon in the Christmas holidays. I saw it in Townsville. It’s not my favourite western because I prefer more action: shoot-outs, chases and Indian attacks.
Dad took us for a walk after tea and showed us more of the sites around the village. We stopped at the Mess for a drink. I saw some of the kids from my class there with their parents. We played darts. Mum even told me to be careful playing that!
Sunday, 24 May
I had to stay home this afternoon to finish unpacking my boxes. All our possessions are here now except Rusty, my Jack Russell terrier. He arrives this week. I bet he hates being cooped up in a cage inside a train carriage. He’ll go bananas when he sees me and when I let him run loose in the backyard.
This house is so new it doesn’t have a garden. Mum had a great garden in Townsville but she says there’s no point trying to establish one here. It’s too hot and dry to grow anything. Even the local oval is dirt.
I found all my other treasures as I unpacked my old diaries: my Superman comics, drawing books and collection of completed cricket scorebooks.
I started drawing and got interested in cricket when I was stuck in hospital. I used to lie in bed and listen to the broadcasts on the wireless. What else was I going to do? I wasn’t allowed to move. Quite often I was tied to my bed. Some of the nurses were really rough.
‘We’re doing this for your own good, Anthony.’
Sure they were! Straightening my legs and tying them in that position when the muscles wanted to stay curled up and comfortable. It was bad enough having it done to me, but even worse to hear them doing it to others in the ward. Some of those were really little kids and they screamed.
I learned not to cry when they worked on me because I didn’t want the mean nurses to think they could make me cry.
Mum wanted to unpack my heaviest boxes but I wouldn’t let her. I told her I’m strong enough to do that.
In my room I’ve got a bed, a dressing table, a bookcase and a desk. I put my small drawings and cricket books in the bookcase and the big drawings under my bed. My diaries fitted perfectly into the little shelf on my headboard. There are seven of them, starting in February 1948. The first one has lots of short entries because I didn’t write much when I first started. Mum gave me that diary the Christmas after I got polio. I did some drawings in it too and I wrote letters to my friends and my grandma. She used to visit me and sit and read her letters. I never posted them.
I was only allowed to have visitors once a week for an hour on Sunday afternoons when I was no longer contagious. No-one was allowed to visit for the first few weeks. None of my friends ever visited. Their parents were scared they’d catch polio from me.
Alan McGilvray’s voice ‘visited’ me every day when there was an Australian test cricket match being played, because he did the wireless commentaries. I listened to every ball and learned a lot about the game. I used to play backyard cricket with Dad before I got sick, but Mum hasn’t let me since. For a while I couldn’t. I couldn’t even stand up, let alone bat or bowl. In Townsville I sometimes used to practise bowling when Mum wasn’t watching. You can’t practise batting by yourself.
Monday, 25 May
Our social studies teacher told us some men are climbing to the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. My legs will never be strong enough to climb mountains, but I don’t care. Who wants to climb a mountain? Once you get to the top you have to turn around and climb down. That seems dumb to me. If I was Superman I could fly to the top. That’d be more fun.
Dad is rostered to work on the base all this week doing general maintenance on the trucks. When he’s on that roster he goes to work after breakfast and comes home for evening dinner, just like a normal father. When he’s rostered to do transport duties he’s often away for days, sometimes weeks. He doesn’t mind, especially if they go bush. He loves driving. One day he’s going to buy us a car.
He can ride horses too. He grew up on an outback station. I’ve never been to Grandma and Grandpa’s property. It’s way out in western Queensland, near the Northern Territory border. During the war Dad was in the Army and couldn’t take me. After the war I got polio and couldn’t travel out back. In fact, because I was sick I hardly ever left Townsville until we shifted here.
Before Mum and I arrived in Woomera Dad told us he drove truckloads of supplies out into the desert. They’re building another part of the rocket range way out in the middle of nowhere. Dad said its location is ‘Hush hush. Top Secret.’ Most parts of the rocket range have a few work buildings but this new site is more like a little town. There’s even an airstrip, and on one trip Dad saw a helicopter. It’s the only one in Australia, that’s how important the place is. A couple of weeks before Mum and I arrived, the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, visited here. Dad says something big is being planned. He’s not important enough to know what it is though.
Mum said there was no way she’d live further out in the desert. Woomera is remote enough for her. It’s really different from Townsville, but I love it because there’s lots of freedom. We kids can do anything.
Wednesday, 27 May
I earned threepence today. Robert paid me to do a drawing of a rocket. I’ve never seen one, so I drew an imaginary one like I’ve seen in films. He liked the drawing, but said that’s not what real rockets look like. He’s going to show me a photograph of one.
He got a good mark for ‘his’ drawing but a bad one for the colouring in. It wasn’t very good. He should have asked me to do that too.
Friday, 29 May
Rusty arrived this arvo. Mum had him locked in the house when I got home from school. She said he knew I was coming as soon as I walked down the side of the house. When I opened the back door he went crazy. He leapt into my arms then jumped down and raced around the room, leaping on and off the furniture. His craziness made Mum laugh.
He’s going to sleep in my room. Dad used an empty packing box to make him a kennel. Mum put an old cushion in it for him to sleep on. I bet he won’t sleep there though. He’ll creep up onto my bed when I turn the light off. He always does.
Mum bought Rusty for me so I had a friend when I first came home from hospital. He’s four now. He’s really clever. He’ll do anything I tell him to do. He relates better to males. He obeys Dad but is very naughty for Mum. She likes Rusty even though he’s disobedient. She says he’s done me a lot of good.
I called him Rusty because that was the name of Superman’s dog when he was a boy (before he discovered he was Superboy).
Saturday, 30 May
We went rabbiting today. Dave’s got a whole pile of traps under his tank stand. We dragged some out with a rake, because there were too many spiders under there to crawl under and get them. Dave said last summer a 10-foot snake was living under there. He got bitten, but the poison didn’t hurt him. Sometimes I think Dave makes up stories. Like the one about finding a skeleton in the desert.
We put out a dozen traps. I’ve never set a rabbit trap before. They’re very scary. They’re like a metal mouth. You force the jaws open, lock them with their teeth ready to snap, then cover them with sand at the entrance to a burrow. When the rabbit comes hopping out for breakfast, BANG! It gets him. You peg the trap into the ground so the rabbit can’t hop away with it. The ground here’s so hard they can’t pull the pegs out.
I thought the traps would kill them but Dave said they usually don’t. He often has to do that when he checks the traps the next morning. He goes out really early. I wouldn’t be allowed to go so I won’t ask. I know what Mum’s like: overprotective.
She’s been worse since we shifted here. I think that’s because she’s not happy. She’s met most of the women and says they’re all really friendly, but she complains there’s not enough to do. ‘It’s like living in a cage. In Townsville I could get off the base and go into town or to the beach, but here there’s nowhere to go apart from the village.’
I think there’s tons to do and lots of places t
o go to.
Sunday, 31 May
We caught five rabbits last night. Dave had them hanging upside-down under his back veranda when I went over after breakfast. He got up in the dark to bring them in. Two other traps had gone off, but didn’t catch anything. Dave said he caught a dingo once but it bit off its foot to escape the trap and ran away.
When I told Dad he said there aren’t any dingoes here. There’s a fence to the north that was built to keep them on the other side. He said the fence goes right across Australia. Dave knew about the fence but reckons dingoes jump it. The one that chewed his foot off won’t be leaping fences any more.
Dave’s dad helped skin the rabbits and gave one to me. Mum’s going to cook it tonight. I like stew but I’m not keen on rabbit stew. Dad loves it. He eats rabbit when he’s out bush. He says that if everyone in Australia ate as much ‘bush mutton’ as he does there wouldn’t be a rabbit plague.
The government’s trying to wipe out the rabbits with a disease called myxomatosis. Dave calls it myxie. He’s seen a few that have got it. They go blind and walk around in circles. He usually belts them with a big stick to put them out of their misery. Mum thought that was cruel, but Dad was on Dave’s side. He’s seen cattle die of thirst in the bush and says it’s shocking to see them go that way. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind, Beryl.’
He told us that animals last longer than humans in the desert. ‘When it’s stinking hot summer in this part of the world even an experienced bushie would be lucky to last a day without water.’
Dave’s going to dry some rabbit furs to make a sleeping mat for Rusty. I hope he knows how to do it properly or it’ll pong the bedroom out.