Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  Her childhood home was “beautifully run but old-fashioned and rather shabby”, always with masses of flowers arranged by her mother, who wore elaborate, clinging dresses known as tea-gowns in the evenings while her father and brothers wore dinner jackets, a formality that was rare among station owners.

  John, or “Jack” as he was known, and Roy were seven and four when their sister was born: “They had both prayed ardently for a baby sister and I became a toy to them. They alternately spoiled and teased and tormented me. I was rather a timid child, but I tried to be brave and to do all the things my brothers did because they were proud of me and said I was almost as good as any boy.

  “I was sensitive and imaginative with large, hazel eyes and a pale, heart-shaped face and short hair. I was allowed to go about in riding breeches except on Sundays when we all went to church. Then I had to wear a stiff muslin frock with a wide sash bow at the back. The parson and his tiresome wife usually had luncheon with us afterwards. I disliked her because she constantly remarked: ‘Little girls should be seen and not heard’. She never said anything disagreeable about the boys. I hated being a girl and used to pray that God would turn me into a boy overnight.”

  The conflict of being a female in a male world and being expected to behave in a certain manner would be a constant struggle and a mark on her life, Sheila once making herself sick by drinking a bottle of Worcestershire sauce when challenged by her brothers “to prove them wrong and in defence of my sex”. She adored the wildness of her fourteenth-birthday present, a black mare named Mariana, which she rode with deliberate abandon and laughed when the grooms told her she would “break her bloody neck”.

  These were important statements of independence, perhaps not so much intended for those around her but to satisfy herself, like the day she harnessed Mariana to a cart called a longshafter and, without telling anyone, drove to the nearby village of Breadalbane to collect the mail, only to be thrown and almost killed when her horse bolted after being confronted with a rare sight on country roads—a motor car: “It did not teach me a lesson,” she wrote. “Nothing ever does.”

  Sheila loved the farm, separated from the main house by a dusty ribbon of road, but was caught between its mystery and its horror; delighted at the overnight arrival of baby pigs, goats and cows, and disgusted yet intrigued by the bloody slaughterhouse: “I occasionally sat on the fence and watched the pen man cut a sheep’s throat and then skin the poor animal.”

  The shearing shed was the real attraction, with its rough workers like Jock, who had amputated his own foot with an axe rather than let the poison from a tiger snake kill him. The shed was no place for a girl, he told her, before allowing her a turn at being a tar boy, to dab and brush tar to seal nicks on sheep when the shears drew blood. “This made me feel most important, but I was always sorry for the sheep, their lives seemed to me to be hideous: they were eternally herded together in their thousands, driven for miles amidst clouds of dust in the burning sun, dogs snapping at their heels, kicked and cursed, then shorn and often badly cut. No wonder they looked so bewildered!”

  The young girl sat enthralled on top of the 6-metre fence of the “round yard” to watch her brothers break horses. By the age of nine they had taught her to ride any horse, swim and crack a stock whip. She had killed her first snake and watched it be devoured on an anthill and once galloped for hours at dawn in a wild kangaroo hunt with her brothers and a pack of dogs. “It had taken months to persuade an apprehensive mother and indulgent father . . . that I was old enough and could ride well enough to go out with the boys. I had a strong will and I knew it. I was excited and secretly terrified . . . my heart beating so fast I could hardly breathe . . . but of course, I never admitted it.”

  She kept a variety of pets, including a piglet and a lamb born on the same day, which she fed with a bottle and which followed her everywhere. When a pet died, she would arrange an elaborate funeral service. The body of the animal would be placed on a goat cart, which the gardener then led to a pet cemetery near the orchard. Sheila followed dressed in the robes of a nun: “The ceremony would always include Mummy and Ninget . . . and occasionally Jack and Roy if they felt in the mood. I would read a few words of the burial service and a cross with the animal’s name on it would mark the grave.”

  Of all her animals it was the rabbits she collected that especially caught her heart; forbidden creatures she’d hide in the wine cellar when the government inspectors arrived every few months, trying to eradicate the introduced menace that was so out of control across Australia that if Sheila gazed off into the distance at dusk their sheer numbers made it look as if the hard brown land was moving.

  As always though, there was a practical side to rural life: “Although my heart always ached for the rabbits, once they were dead it seemed different. Jack and Roy taught me to skin them expertly in 30 seconds. I was proud of the achievement.”

  Occasionally Sheila would remove herself from the male world of the station and lie in the long grass of the orchard beneath the pear trees, where she would construct plays in her head, once convincing her brothers to dress up and put on a play she had written about a woman who ended up as a convent nun because of unrequited love.

  Margaret Chisholm, encouraging her daughter’s creative spirit, gave her a bound copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetry for her fourteenth birthday, as well as a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Her imagination soared: “I sometimes dreamed of flying to England and America in an airship, not unlike Arabian Nights and magic carpets.

  “I suppose I was a queer mixture of romanticism and boyishness. I wrote these sentimental poems and stories, and yet was really happy with my horse and dogs and particular family pets. I liked to go out all day and help to round up the sheep and cattle, and I once swam my horse over a swollen river for a bet. I was quite unconscious of my looks.”

  Jack and Roy would certainly not tolerate any notion that their sister was anything but a tomboy, washing her face under an old pump near the kitchen the day they detected she had a dash of powder on her nose and teasing her about having a 43-centimetre waistline. Sheila accepted it with good grace but was embarrassed when they found her secret book in which she wrote her poems and began tittering over a verse titled “Is It Love?”:

  Is it love, this nameless longing?

  This aching, lonely feeling,

  that round my heart seems stealing,

  and makes my pulse race.

  Is it love that makes me want you?

  Feel I cannot live without you,

  is it love that makes me doubt you?

  With your strange, elusive face.

  Despite the isolation Sheila had several girl friends, relationships mostly made when the family rented a house in Sydney each year during the late summer. Mollee Little was her best chum, one of five children of the prominent pastoralist and businessman Charles Little, who had settled his family in a grand old mansion called Brooksby House, at the bottom of Ocean Avenue as the slope of Darling Point flattened out and slid into Sydney Harbour.

  Mollee would come and stay at Wollogorang for holidays where they memorised Alice in Wonderland and read the poems of Baudelaire, talked about life and love and confided in each other: “We wondered what was just around the corner, beyond the lagoon—unknown, intangible, mysterious, exciting things—the places where you will never be, the lover you will never know. We didn’t really understand half the time what we were talking about. We decided that when we married, we must feel like the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘A Woman’s Shortcomings’”:

  Unless you can think, when the song is done,

  No other is soft in the rhythm;

  Unless you can feel, when left by One,

  That all men else go with him;

  Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,

  That your beauty itself wants proving;

  Unless you can swear “For life, for death!”—


  Oh, fear to call it loving!

  Sheila’s brother Roy was in love with Mollee, and Roy’s best friend, a boy called Lionel who would also come to stay at the property, was infatuated with Sheila. Although Mollee felt the same about Roy, Sheila couldn’t bring herself to declare romantic feelings for Lionel who pestered her about the future, promising to one day marry her and take her around the world in a “flying machine”. Despite her rebuttal of Lionel’s advances, they hung around with Roy and Mollee during holidays at Wollogorang as an “inseparable” foursome.

  Sheila once tried to explain her feelings for a boy with whom she was quite happy to lie in the fields and wish on the evening star but knew she would never marry: “I suppose I loved Lionel in a childish way. I loved him as I loved my brothers only slightly differently which I couldn’t even explain to myself.”

  As Harry Chisholm’s business grew, so did the demands on his time in the city of Sydney, 200 kilometres to the north; here he made his way up the business and social ladders of colonial society, marking out his business territory in the heart of the CBD and creating his political base as a committeeman at the Australian Jockey Club.

  Sheila had been educated at home for most of her formative years, making life as difficult as possible for the series of governesses who travelled out from Sydney only to be sent packing. This was the norm for girls, in a society moving only cautiously toward the notion that women were “robust” enough to tackle a formal education.

  She and her mother would make the occasional trip to Sydney, usually catching a steamer at Kiama as it made its way up the coast from Melbourne. Sheila was gradually introduced into Sydney society circles, at first as a twelve-year-old dressed as “Cherry Ripe” at a children’s fancy dress party at Government House and then graduating to being seen at race meetings as a seventeen year old—“Miss Sheila Chisholm, beech brown silk poplin skirt and coat, black hat with a crown of Bulgarian silk, finished with a long black quill.”

  The trips also meant she could catch up with Mollee, where the poetry readings and talk of love were replaced with high jinks, getting in trouble for wild pranks and dares, as Sheila would recall: “I’m afraid we were rather naughty, disobedient, wild girls and we did some pretty foolish things. We had a favourite expression ‘I will put you on your mettle’ which, on thinking it over, I suppose meant ‘I double-dare you’.”

  Their antics were at times dangerous, particularly at Bondi Beach where they loved body surfing and swimming out further than other swimmers, often out beyond the breakers despite warnings about sharks—“our boast was we liked to go out further than the furthest man”—until the day they watched the water boil crimson as a nearby swimmer lost his leg to a shark. “This episode dampened our enthusiasm for showing off.”

  The formal shift from country to city life came in 1912 when Wollogorang was sold after seventy years as the family home. Despite her deep passion for the property, Sheila would make just a bare mention of the sale in her private memoir, blaming it on an inability of her brothers to “get on together”: “Chissie said he didn’t want them to wait for him to die and so he gave them the money,” she wrote. “Jack bought an enormous property in Queensland called Wantalayna. Roy bought a place called Khan Younis in NSW. Chissie and Ag [Margaret] decided to live in Sydney.”

  The Chisholms settled among the grand houses of Woollahra and Sheila finished her education at Kambala Anglican School for Girls in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where she was among the original enrolment of fifty girls who moved into the school’s rambling premises overlooking Rose Bay.

  It was a peaceful, uncluttered environment at Kambala, a name apparently derived from an Indian word meaning “Hill of Flowers”, which was among the first private schools for girls established in Sydney as debate raged about the ability of young women to handle a male education curriculum. Until the latter part of the 19th century, girls had largely been educated at home but more and more schools were now opening, particularly to the upper classes, and Sydney University had recently even opened its gates to female matriculants. The girls at Kambala did not wear uniforms and were taught mainstream subjects such as English, French and Latin, as well as Mathematics and Science. Other classes offered included Elocution, Dressmaking, Dancing, Singing, Music, Drawing and Painting. “The moral training of the girls, both in character and manners, is most carefully watched over,” a prospectus of the day reassured parents.

  But this breakthrough in education was a mere stepping stone on the long and difficult path to equality; for the moment, the expectation for most young women remained one of marriage and children: “Chased and chaste,” her mother warned. Sheila’s destiny seemed no different and, as she took leave of her friends at the Hotel Australia gathering, it was time for her to make the transition into the adult world—her finishing school would not be in the classroom but in the social whirl of Paris and Munich and possibly even in being presented as a debutante at Buckingham Palace.

  Her parents had talked about it for years, particularly her mother: “She was ambitious for me and wanted me to finish my somewhat sketchy education in Europe—an idea that many parents acquired years later. Anyway, she argued, I was far too young to be married, even though Chissie reminded her she was sixteen when they were wed.”

  Margaret may also have been encouraged by a reading she once received about her daughter from a famous Chinese astrologer who told her that he couldn’t tell her anything about Sheila’s future because her stars belonged to the northern hemisphere and he was only able to read stars from the southern hemisphere. Chissie declared it hokum and dubbed her the “child of fate”.

  Harry Chisholm, easygoing and good-natured, particularly with his daughter, was not among the guests at his daughter’s farewell that afternoon, or at least not mentioned in the list of mostly young friends who sipped tea and exchanged pleasantries for a few hours. He was probably in his elegant sandstone office one block away, at the corner of King and Castlereagh streets, his attention fixed on the annual Easter sales at his yards in Randwick where dozens of established thoroughbreds and 237 yearlings would go under the hammer.

  Perhaps Chissie would have acted differently, and been more attentive to the plans of his wife and daughter and insisted they stay home, if he had had a more realistic sense of what lay ahead for his family and the nation. Even though there were storm clouds of war on the horizon the future must have seemed so bright and the possibilities endless. The threat of war in Europe simply seemed so far away, physically and politically. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had reassured them just a few days before that the British Navy was superior to the German fleet and that Australia was safe because of Britain’s alliance with Japan.

  But these assurances were naive, and the threat was real. Most of the dozen or so young men attending Sheila’s farewell that afternoon would enlist within a year to fight for King and Country on the other side of the world. Many among them would return physically shattered or psychologically damaged, but other guests would not. William Laidley, a friend of her brother Roy, would be awarded a Military Cross for gallantry in August 1918, only to die a few days later amid the human carnage of the Somme.

  The party moved inside as the afternoon breeze threatened to remove the ladies’ hats and send them fluttering off the balcony and into the street below; it finally broke up so that Sheila and her mother could go home to finish packing for what they thought would be a six-month sojourn. Next morning, as Sheila boarded the Mongolia and waved goodbye to her father on the dock, there was no sense that it would be more than six years before she would see him again.

  “I felt excited by the prospect of this trip but sad also,” she would reminisce. “It would probably be enjoyable to see new places and meet new people and would only be for a few months. I hated the thought of leaving Chissie, my brothers, Mollee and my pets but to my surprise I hated to leave Lionel most of all. I suddenly realised I would miss him, and remembered how often we h
ad both been entranced by the beauty of the black swans on the lagoon at sunset and by the brilliance of the multi-coloured parakeets that perched in the trees or wheeled screeching overhead as we rode through the paddocks in the early morning and the haunting scent of the wattle and the gum trees. He appreciated sunsets and dawns and black swans and white blossoms and the scent of wattle, and understood how it made one feel. But did he really understand?

  “I felt these emotions so deeply myself that I wanted to share them with somebody else, even if I had to pretend. When I was very young I had always dressed up my dolls, and to me they became real people who thought and spoke and lived, exactly as I wanted them to think and speak and live. They also lived in imaginary dream houses, which I could see so vividly at night, just before going to sleep. Mummy warned me against this trait in my character. She said: ‘You must be careful, this make-believe may bring you unhappiness some day. Do not try to turn people into what you want them to be; do not fancifully decorate them as one decorates a Christmas tree for, if you do, the awful moment will surely come when you will find the branches bare, stripped of all the ornaments of your lively imagination pinned upon them. It is better not to live in a world of dreams’.”

  The Sunday Times newspaper also reported their departure, the short but prescient mention appearing in the social pages:

  Mrs Harry Chisholm and her daughter, Miss Sheila, were among the travellers who left for Europe on Wednesday by the Mongolia. They have gone for a tour of Europe and expect to be away for some time. Mrs Chisholm was a Miss MacKellar and was one of the belles of Sydney. Miss Sheila Chisholm is very popular.

  2

  I THOUGHT THIS MUST BE LOVE

  June 18, 1914: The London Season was approaching its peak and the attendant Sydney Morning Herald journalist, writing the column “A Woman’s Day”, was glowing in her delight: