by J. B. Rowley
“Too right!” someone called.
Bluey shook his head and laughed at the memory.
“I thought it was some codger out there in the bush,” he said to me, “so we went off to see who it was but whenever we got close to the sound it’d stop. Then it’d start up again in another direction and further way. So off we’d go in the direction of the music and, blow me down, if it didn’t move to another spot again, still playin’ the same tune. I couldn’t work it out.”
“Yeah, old Bluey thought we had a ghost in the bush,” someone called out. Someone else started to sing a line from the song.
And his ghost may be heard, as you camp by the billabong.
The others joined in for the last line.
You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me.
“Scared the daylights out of Bluey, did Matilda.”
“He was all for packin’ up camp and goin’ back to town.”
“Too right, I was,” said Bluey. “I wasn’t sleepin’ out here with some ghost roamin’ around in the bush.”
Everyone laughed. Bluey grinned across at me and winked.
“How did you know it was Matilda?” I asked.
“Well,” said Bluey, taking a long gulp of his tea. “She started singing other sounds, like the wood chopping we just heard and other birds’ songs. When she mixed those up with Waltzing Matilda, we figured out it was a lyrebird. That’s when we gave her the name Matilda. See?”
I nodded.
These days, many people believe that if you hear a lyrebird expertly mimicking sounds it must be a male. However, it was documented as early as 1908 that the female lyrebird is also an excellent mimic. On 5 October, 1908 the Adelaide newspaper The Register reported that ‘Mr A. E. Kitson, a thoroughly competent observer and one who has a unique experience of the birds... put on record the fact that the female also is a great mimic’. The newspaper went on to list the ‘curious assortment’ of sounds one female lyrebird had produced in the presence of Mr Kitson.
It was one of my childhood dreams to see a lyrebird in the bush but, although we managed to find the mounds of lyrebirds I never managed to actually see one.
Lyrebirds and other bush creatures featured strongly in our lives out on the Bonang. For us, the days opened and closed with the sounds from the bush. When the morning light dawned, our rooster competed with the calls of currawongs, bellbirds, kookaburras and magpies.
In the evenings, the night air brought us the rumbling growl of possums, the chattering of nocturnal insects, frogs calling across the dam and night owls hooting ‘mo...poke’ through the trees. Our natural amphitheatre was vast and yet the crisp, clear sounds wrapped us in a sweet intimacy. Sometimes as I lay in my bed listening I would pick out a particular sound and smile, sure it was Matilda the mimic.
Chapter 6
The year 1956 in Australia saw Liberal Prime Minister Bob Menzies secure in his fourth term of government and the country in the grip of Olympic Games mania.
The Olympics were to be held in the city of Melbourne; the first time in the southern hemisphere. In fact, it was a year of firsts: the first time Australia had hosted such a large event, the first time the Olympic Games included a closing ceremony and the first time Australia’s Postmaster General had issued full-colour stamps. Another significant first that year was the introduction of Australia’s national television service.
However, it would be a very long time before my parents would be able to afford a television set. Their new family was expanding at a rapid rate. My mother was expecting another child to add to their brood of five: Bobby, Maxie, me and the twins, Georgie and Kevin. There was no money for luxuries such as birthday presents. Birthdays were not even mentioned in our house probably because it was easier to forget about them altogether than to struggle with the problem of finding the money to buy presents. What money Mum and Dad could put aside went towards trying to buy Christmas presents. Mum also saved the labels on the packets of Lan Choo tea and redeemed them for various items. Our grandparents bought us simple Christmas gifts and sometimes the local shopkeepers donated goods. I remember Mr Orme Andrews, who owned a toy shop in Orbost, arriving at our place one Christmas with a bag of toys for my brothers and me. My gift was a large doll: the largest doll I had ever seen.
Feeding a growing family must have been a gruelling challenge for Mum. However, like most mothers of her time, she was resourceful and constantly found new ways to make a little go a long way. Potatoes were cheap because we grew our own. They were excellent for filling our tummies, especially when mashed with a little butter and milk added to make them fluffy. A mound of mashed potatoes made our plates look overflowing with food.
Meat was expensive to buy but considered important at every meal. Sometimes we got sheep from the farm which my father, with his butcher training, was able to cut up expertly. Rabbit stew was often on the menu. Rabbits were plentiful; in fact they were a pest in Australia at the time. All Dad had to do was go out and shoot them and skin them. When Mum did buy meat from the butcher, it was always the cheapest cuts. She would make minced meat ‘go further’ by mixing it up in a bowl with a beaten egg, breadcrumbs made from stale bread and chopped onions. This mixture was flattened out, cut into squares and fried. We all loved Mum’s minced meat rissoles.
We also loved her patty cakes. These were little cakes baked in corrugated paper cups. She would bake at least one enormous tray full of those little cakes in the capacious oven of the old wood stove almost every day. When they were cooked she would protect her hands with a thick tea-towel and remove the heavy iron tray laden with hot cakes, releasing the tempting aroma to waft through the house. Like eager little mice ever on the alert for a new source of food, my brothers and I would materialise in the kitchen. Surreptitiously, our hands reached out. By the time Mum had placed the tray on the table, gaps had appeared in the evenly arranged rows of cakes but she never gave any indication that she noticed. Before too long, there was going to be another pair of hands to steal her cakes away.
I knew that when this new baby arrived, Mum would have her Box Brownie camera out. As soon as possible after the birth of a new child, she took a family shot. Dad must have managed to fulfil his promise to buy her a camera and she used it to snap pictures of us at every opportunity. I wonder if this was prompted by a deep rooted fear of losing her children. She had no photos of Bertie, Audrey and Noel and must have wanted to make sure that if anything happened to us she would have our images on record.
I once came across an old cardboard box with many small packets of undeveloped films; the hundreds of photos of us that Mum took but could not afford to have developed. I am surprised that she managed to afford to have as many of the films developed as she did. Most of the photos have now been lost but there are enough there to demonstrate what must have bordered on an obsession for my mother.
While Mum snapped photos of new additions to the family, Dad celebrated by singing and whistling. He was always delighted at the prospect of being a father again. I found out later from my brothers that he was ecstatic when I, his first daughter, came along. Apparently he went around for days whistling and singing Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair. I never did find out how I came to be called June and not Jean. After me, came the twins which gave my father further cause for pride and jubilation. “It’s a double-yoker,” was his response to those who offered their congratulations.
He was just as excited about the expected arrival of his sixth child. He often lifted his old navy beret from his head, threw it into the air and caught it on the way down yelling, “I’m gonna be a dad. I’m gonna be a father again.”
My mother’s reaction was understandably more restrained. Each pregnancy would have stirred the ghosts of sorrow: memories of her first three pregnancies and the loss of those children. This must have dulled the joy of anticipation and added to the physical burden of pregnancy and childbirth. I think she also felt the weight of financial hardship.
She would sigh and say, “Another m
outh to feed.”
Apart from money worries, Mum still had the stress of having to cope on her own for up to two weeks at a stretch each time my father went out to the woodcutters’ camp. The absence of a husband who wrapped her in love and warmth and cherished her with unabashed abandon must have added a sharp edge to her isolation.
Although financial commitment to his family was limited by circumstances, Dad’s emotional commitment was seemingly endless. He loved being with Mum and did all he could to spend time with his family. One of my favourite memories is evening picnics on the Snowy River. Dad would catch a few big bream with a simple fishing line, scale and gut them and cook them directly on the hot coals of our fire; a truly delicious meal.
He taught us what to do if we encountered a snake in the bush and showed my brothers how to chop wood and fell trees. He was patient when he encouraged us to climb up on the back of our old draught horse, Nugget, for bareback rides around the yard. Old Nugget used to be part of a team of horses that helped haul logs out of the forest.
Drives through the bush were regular family outings. Dad stopped along the way to allow us to explore creek beds and climb trees and to teach us what he knew about the bush; pointing out various trees so that we learned to recognise a yellow stringybark from a mahogany or a messmate. Sometimes he took us out to the bush after a bushfire. An empty and silent forest greeted us. The scorched black ground was bare of scrub, dried leaves and undergrowth which had been burnt away. In the stillness, a battlefield of leafless trees stood like tall black sentinels. From time to time smoke sizzled from smouldering cinders on the ground but apart from that there was no sound and no forest smells.
Bushfires were pretty much an annual event in the Orbost area. Fires often raced through the forests around the town. Our home out on the Bonang, being surrounded by bush, was in a dangerous position. Just prior to bushfire season, Dad, with the help of some of the woodcutters, conducted controlled burns, known as burning off, in the strip of forest that bordered our paddock as well as the bush along Duggans Road.
It was not unusual, in the summer, to see billowing clouds of smoke on the horizon or rising above the tree tops. The sight of fires sweeping along the hills was a source of delight for us kids. We were fascinated by the smell of burning eucalypts and the changing red and orange colours of the flames. In fact, Maxie and I were so inspired by the fires we witnessed that one year we won first and second prize in a school art competition for our paintings of fires, even though neither of us had demonstrated any particular artistic talent before.
Despite our poverty, Dad sometimes bought each of us a small treat (usually the cheapest available chocolate bars) when he made a trip into the township of Orbost. He would usually buy at least one bag of lollies such as Minties which he kept aside to be shared around over a period of several weeks. He sometimes gave me an extra lolly when the boys were not around. He would wink at me as he offered it to me and say, “Don’t tell your mother.” Mum did not like us eating too many lollies.
“Lollies are bad for your teeth,” she used to say. “Why do you need lollies when we’ve got fresh fruit growing on trees?”
I doubt that Dad kept these ‘secret’ treats from my mother. I think it was just his way of making me feel special. He succeeded. I adored my father. No, I idolised my father. Although he was the symbol of authority in our family, he was, at the same time, the one who initiated fun, laughter and adventure. When he was away working in the bush I missed him terribly. I have no doubt that this was what caused me, one day when I was around six years old, to allow myself to be lured into one of the most dangerous situations a child could face.
It was a weekend and my two older brothers had, probably as a result of stern instructions from Mum to include their little sister, taken me with them on one of their regular jaunts to the local rubbish tip. I rode in the cart that Bobby had on the back of his bike. On the return journey it would be filled with various bits and pieces but I would find a crevice to squeeze my skinny body into.
We trundled along the highway and turned into the track that led to the area in the bush that had been set aside for the locals to dump their rubbish. The steamy smell of fermenting organic matter coalesced with the bracing scent of eucalyptus. When we arrived, I hopped out of the cart and ran toward the entwined piles of twisted metal, garden scraps, broken furniture, children’s unwanted toys and other assorted and ‘assaulted’ junk. Bobby leant his bike against a tree. Maxie’s bike fell to the ground and lay sideways, one wheel still spinning as he raced his brother to the waiting trash. We were all tense with excitement at the thought of potential treasures waiting to be found. My brothers whooped and yelled whenever they found a piece of machinery or bits of old cars.
“Hey! Look what I found.”
“I found a whole steering wheel. Look!”
They examined and compared each other’s discoveries. Some items were thrown back onto the piles of rubbish and some were carefully placed in the cart. I searched only for books. I always found some. It never ceased to amaze me that people could be so rich as to afford to throw books away; ‘perfectly good books’ as my mother would say.
There was one other person there that day. He was a little distance away from us picking his way through the rubbish. When I first noticed him, I stopped what I was doing and made to walk toward him because, for an instant, I thought he was my father. He wore similar work clothes, with sleeves rolled up over brown muscular arms. He had the same thick black hair and his face was, so it seemed to me, the same dark brown as my father’s deeply suntanned face. Something stopped me from going to him; perhaps the rational part of my brain acknowledged that if he were my father, Bobby and Maxie would have recognised him. Yet when the man turned, possibly noticing my movement, and fixed his dark brown eyes on me, I saw my dad’s eyes and I projected my father’s features onto the man’s face. He smiled at me. Part of me was sure he was the father whom I was missing dreadfully because he had been away working in the bush for over a week.
As I lost myself in my illusion about the man, I became less aware of my brothers who continued their noisy discoveries. The man gradually moved closer to me. I was mesmerised. I wanted so much for him to be Dad. He said nothing but smiled at me from time to time as he picked over bits of rubbish. My brothers moved further away, determined not to overlook any new piles of rubbish that might have arrived since their last visit to the tip. I had already found several books. Clutching them to my chest, I concentrated on watching the man who was my father and yet was not my father.
When my brothers called to me, their voices reached my ears as though from far away.
“Come on, June.”
I ignored them.
“Come on. We’re going now.”
I could not leave this man. I could not bear the thought of being separated from him. He had his back to my brothers and seemed to be still sifting through rubbish but he inclined his head in my direction, smiled and spoke softly.
“Want to ride on my bike?”
I nodded. My brothers had mounted their bikes and rode over to us.
“Hop in the cart,” Bobby said to me. “We’re going home now.”
I said nothing.
“All right,” said Maxie. “We’ll leave you here if you don’t get in the cart in five seconds.”
They both counted.
“One. Two.”
This was a technique Mum sometimes used when we refused to comply with her instructions. We had to obey by the time she counted to five - ‘or else’. She rarely had to count all the way to five before we gave her complete obedience. In my case, she rarely made it past the number two.
My brothers turned their bikes to face the track exit.
“Three. Four. You’ll get into trouble if you don’t come with us.”
They started to pedal.
“Five.”
I stayed where I was. My brothers rode along the track slowly. When they realised I was not coming, they increased th
eir pedalling to normal speed and left the rubbish tip. I didn’t care. I felt completely safe with the man I had momentarily replaced my father with. He smiled at me.
I waited, watching his muscular arms while he examined a few more items. Then he stood up, took my hand and led me to where his bicycle was leaning against a tree. He lifted me up and placed me in the basket that was attached to the front handle bars. I sat there, still clutching my books, with my legs dangling over the edge of the basket while he held the bicycle steady and swung one leg over the seat. His strong legs pedalled the bike along the track and out onto the Bonang Highway in the direction of the town and my home.
I couldn’t have been happier. It was as though my longing for my father had been fulfilled by a fairy godmother. A prince had ridden in from a fairy tale and rescued me from my rough, unsympathetic brothers. I was the favoured princess being given exclusive privileges. With smug satisfaction I settled back in the basket and breathed in the tobacco smell coming from the man which was the same as my father’s tobacco smell. Parrots chattered and kookaburras cackled and the bike’s wheels crunched through the gravel and soft yellow dirt by the side of the road. A short distance along the highway, the man stopped his bicycle and dismounted.
“We gotta go up there for a minute.”
He pointed at a dirt track. It was not a road but a track made by the vehicles of the woodcutters who went deep into the bush to fell trees.
This was even more exciting for me. An extra adventure! He wheeled the bicycle, with me still in its basket along the bush track. A breeze whistled through the leaves of the tall eucalypts. Parrots chattered high above us. A startled lizard scampered across the dry leaves on the ground.
When the man stopped and propped the bike against a tree, some primal instinct sent a warning to my brain. I felt uncertain. I looked back along the track but could not see the highway. We were in the bush. The man who was not my father lifted me out of the basket and set me down on the ground. The warning signal that had reached my child brain began to ring like a school bell. Tears rolled down my cheeks. The distant sound of a car engine floated over the tree tops. The man cast a nervous glance back toward the highway. I cried silently. He bent down toward me.