My father said of the drive at the time: ‘It all seemed very desolate and strange after the emerald grasslands and trees of Ireland.’
During the long drive down from Sydney, Jim dropped a bombshell. My father was not to be the manager of Jim’s new farm on the coast after all. He was merely to be a ‘station hand’ at Jim’s 10,000-acre sheep station, Bobingah at Nimmitabel.
This didn’t sound promising, but my father decided to hold his peace and see what awaited him.
Unfortunately what he found on arrival to this remote outpost was far from good.
He was shown his quarters, consisting of a falling down corrugated hut in the yard of the homestead, dunny outside – with the promise they’d inspect the new home tomorrow. Only now, after driving through that very same country, can I imagine my father’s desolation at seeing these high-altitude drought-stricken, rolling khaki uplands with tusks of desiccated grass, dying gumtrees and endless rocky outcrops. The day I was there recently following his tracks, it was so hot and parched that the skeleton-like sheep looked close to death, the horses were dreadfully distressed and even the flies seemed to lack any will to live at all as they desperately clung to my soaked skin. And the ice-cream I’d bought melted before I’d a chance to get out of the shop, let alone back in the car.
Yet my father was there in April with the sub-zero winter about to set in, an even more daunting proposition. The promised new house he was shown comprised a corrugated iron shack in the middle of nowhere. Not a tree in sight. Cold as the Arctic. Wind howling. Snow to follow. No water or electricity. Not even a generator. The great job offered at the Dublin horse show turned out to be as the general dogsbody: chopper of wood, make a new garden out of an eighth of an acre of empty tins (which he did); milk one ferocious jersey cow to feed the cats (for some reason the family didn’t drink fresh milk, only powdered) and any other job that no-one else felt like doing. To add insult to injury, his meagre dinner was left out for him on a fence post, where if he wasn’t quick enough the rats got to it before he did.
Managerial skills were not a necessity. Survival skills certainly were.
No schools were nearby. He was told this wasn’t necessary, for we’d become domestic servants in the homestead as we grew up. This proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s – or in this case – proud Irishman’s back.
He lay awake all of one night agonising as to what to do.
Finally, after a month of slogging it out, he realised he’d been ‘had’.
‘Get out whilst you can,’ he told himself, and this is what he did.
Meaning we had nowhere to go to when we were due to arrive on the Oronsay in a few weeks’ time.
It certainly wasn’t that my father was afraid of hard work.
For despite hollering his instructions from the bathroom window at Drominagh, he’d then go down and join the workmen for a hard day’s slog, and at Clonmoylan, he worked darn hard trying to make it work.
It was just that as he said: ‘There were no prospects at all at this place – for any of you.’
He’d wanted a new life for us. This wasn’t it. How he must have felt? Not knowing a soul, miles from anywhere? An Irishman, touching fifty, in a strange land with his large family arriving shortly? He had no possibility of stopping us – for the Oronsay was already on the high seas. It was certainly proving to be an adventure for him. Not one he’d imagined. In hindsight, an adventure he possibly should have foreseen.
Fortunately he’d bought himself an old Holden ute. ‘The only cars for the Australian country,’ he was told.
So after somehow extracting himself from this barren outpost and his new employers, back he drove in the Holden, up through the centre of New South Wales to his Irish friends, the Frosts at Morriset, where he made preparations for our arrival. Both families had been friends for years and the Frosts had spent many a summer at Drominagh and Clonmoylan. In fact it was because of the Frosts that we’d thought of Australia in the first place.
We, of course, knew nothing of our father’s plight, as we enjoyed a month of the greatest excitement on the Oronsay. I learned how to swim in the ship’s pool, which emptied from one side to the other depending on the lie of the ship, making it a bit of a challenge. We played quoits, table tennis, and shuttlecock. Somehow my mother managed to make us all elaborate costumes for a fancy dress party on deck to celebrate crossing the equator. Generally we made a nuisance of ourselves with the cabin crew, who allowed us into the kitchens and played chasey with us up and down the hallways. On arriving in Sydney they seemed quite heartbroken when we disembarked. Needless to say we were all immensely sad saying goodbye to our new friends.
We’d followed much the same route as my father, stopping at Naples where Gill told me recently: ‘I remember getting off the boat for the day and walking across a huge cobbled square. Then we went up some stairs to a cathedral to pray. I remember it as if it was yesterday.’
When Rob and I were staying on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples, on Sea Dreams, I boarded a ferry across to Naples to search for distant memories. I jumped on a bus, which took me into the hills where I roamed amongst sun-splashed daffodil yellow and strawberry pink villas covered in purple and magenta bougainvillea, and with endless vistas out to the bay. Later I traipsed the winding chaotic streets in the centre of the city where washing was strewn across balconies; there was the piquant aroma of spices and olive oil permeating through shuttered windows; myriads of hassling hawkers and street vendors selling piping hot pizzas; a group of elderly men sitting on a wooden bench gossiping; dogs lolling in the shade, cats preening. Sadly, there were few memories from my distant past, apart from the stench of garbage that still litters the harbour, roads, and gutters. Anchored on Sea Dreams in the bay a few days earlier, piles of rubbish had floated by our stern, including condoms, tin cans and even a child’s plastic chair and rubber car tyres.
When on the Oransay in Port Said in 1954, small rickety traders’ boats came alongside selling leather camels of every imaginable size, jewellery, lengths of cloth and a wealth of other souvenirs, and clothing. A rope would be thrown up, which a passenger would tie to the railing and then purchases and money would be exchanged. I remember lying on the beach in the scorching sun in Ceylon, while my mother bartered with more local traders for tapestry bags, colourful beads, and leather pouffes (foot rests).
‘We went with a group and had lunch at the magnificent Galle Face Hotel, the oldest hotel east of the Suez,’ my mother told me nostalgically. ‘It was listed as one of the 1,000 places to see before you die,’ she laughed, ‘so I thought we had to see it. It’s in a magnificent setting facing the Indian Ocean. Louis Mountbatten used to holiday there.’
In the frantic squalor of India, although my mother was glad to be back in the country she loved so much, she was beside herself with worry.
‘You hadn’t been vaccinated for small pox, as you were sick with an ear infection when the rest of the family were vaccinated. Instead,’ she said with a chuckle, ‘I covered you in holy water and hoped for the best.’
Back on board the Oronsay, Viv and I were almost excommunicated. In those days it was supposedly a mortal sin for a Catholic to go into a non-Catholic service. Diligently, we sat through a great deal of the service before we realised something was amiss. With that, Viv grabbed my hand and we scurried out and hid behind a door in shame. Once again I was sworn to secrecy, Viv assuring me, hands waving in a flurry, dark eyes flashing: ‘There’s nothing for us now, Teeny. We’ll definitely go to Hell.’
For weeks I believed her, until I finally worked up the courage to tell my mother what had happened and she reassured me the Good Lord would probably give us another chance.
Dibs fell out of her top bunk and broke her nose. She also fell madly in love with a fellow passenger, an Indian, who made a great fuss of the beautiful teenager as many did with Gill, who was now rapidly turning into a swan.
My mother told me recently: ‘Despite having all of y
ou in tow, I enjoyed ship life enormously. In a way it reminded me of that long journey I undertook to visit my parents in India so many years before. And everyone was very kind and helpful. Although,’ she went on to say, ‘the thought of the unknown (little did she realise how bad that would be, not having heard from my father as to his fate) and the homesickness for the life I’d left behind did get me down from time to time. But I was determined to make the best of it. After all,’ she said with a deep sigh, when I asked her once again why it was (with my father touching fifty) they’d suddenly upped stakes and taken us across the world like that, ‘it was originally my idea. I never thought for a moment your father would want to do such a thing. As it turned out, he was far more enthusiastic about it in the end than I was. By that stage I was wracked with second thoughts. However, he would have none of it. It became a sort of challenge.’
Chapter 11
Arriving to the Unexpected
We arrived in Australia on the 6th May, 1954, to the Fremantle Docks in Western Australia, where we were met by Jack Taylor, a rugged, jovial young man, the son of an Irish cattle dealer my parents had known back in Ireland, who gently took us under his wing and showed us around.
Even if our accents sometimes portrayed us as being well off, unfortunately this was not the case. What money we received from the sale of Clonmoylan, about four thousand pounds, was soon eaten up with farming debts, travelling and removal costs. A small amount was put aside for our beginnings in Australia.
‘About one thousand pounds is all we arrived with,’ my mother told me. ‘Not a lot to get started in a new life. Maybe in hindsight we had stars in our eyes.’
The port at Fremantle bustled with activity. I loved the narrow winding streets, colourful fishermen’s cottages, and sandstone buildings surrounding the port. But it was the butterfly blue water and the clear blue skies I loved the most. Hardly a cloud was to be seen. And even in May a stifling hot wind blew through the open windows of the car, ruffling our hair and filling our lungs. I couldn’t believe we were actually here in Australia. That it wasn’t just postcards and brochures we were looking at. During the long passage across the world, I was sometimes so homesick for Clonmoylan, our animals and Brownie and Mary, I cried often into my pillow. Now, fickle as I was, those thoughts were quickly hurled aside. Instead I was like a glass of fizzy lemonade bubbling over the top with excitement at the prospect of what our new life would be like.
A number of days later, after arriving through the heads into Sydney Harbour, my mother’s exhilaration at seeing my father waiting for us to disembark at the docks was soon dissipated. Needless to say, she was less than impressed to find there was no job, no house and no prospect of either.
‘It wasn’t a promising start to our new life,’ she told me with a wry grin.
She rallied around slightly, as we all jumped into the Holden ute – with our luggage following in a taxi. My father drove steadily in the busy peak hour traffic across Sydney Harbour Bridge, his familiar tweed hat perched high on his sunburnt head, his pipe firmly clasped between his teeth. Crowded in the back tray of the ute, we chatted ten to the dozen.
Unfortunately my mother’s mood deteriorated again on being shown the dour and meagre rooms my father had organised for us in a run-down self-catering hostel in Neutral Bay, requiring the guests to have their own pots and pans, crockery and cutlery. We had none.
‘A slight oversight on your father’s behalf when he made the booking,’ my mother told me. ‘The humiliation of having to beg and scrounge is still engraved in my mind fifty years later.’
I was so overcome with the excitement of exploring the pokey hallways, fire escapes, and dark alleys that I didn’t notice the lacking of the finer things at the time. Yet my first glimpse of Sydney Harbour is still etched in my mind. The Harbour Bridge appeared not nearly high enough for our monstrous liner to pass underneath. A number of years ago I sailed under the bridge on our yacht Oceania and sat on the deck looking up at the huge expanse of steel, remembering all those years ago doing just the same thing.
To a seven year old, who, up until then, had only had a few trips to Dublin, Sydney Harbour was awe inspiring. I remember the tall city buildings, the passenger ferries jostling for berths at Circular Quay, the brightly coloured sailing boats tacking to give way to the Oronsay, the wooded islands dotted amidst the expanse of blue water. There were sandy beaches and rambling houses and verdant gardens rolling down to the water’s edge. So many of the suburban bungalows seemed to have red tiled roofs and, like Perth, the sky was the bluest blue. Perched on the eastern side of the harbour was an enormous sandstone Gothic building, Rose Bay Convent, later to become my boarding school.
Not far from the hostel we found a small café where we were enthralled with two new experiences: milk shakes in aluminium containers and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. It was perfect autumn weather. About 70 degrees Fahrenheit. We relished the warmth after the cold Irish winter in the small bungalow in Bray.
Fortunately only a short time was spent in the inglorious hostel at Neutral Bay, before we children piled into the back tray of the Holden onto the Pacific highway to our new life in Australia. No thought of seatbelts here as we crouched around our luggage, waving excitedly to passing cars and truck drivers who tailed us. As soon as we left the suburbs and headed over the Hawkesbury River, we looked everywhere for a kangaroo or wallaby. Alas, none were to be seen. Compared to Ireland the countryside was open and barren. Flocks of dust-spattered sheep lolled under stands of gumtrees and huge dams were filled with muddy sludge. There was the golden glow of yellow wattle and a lot of the ground was covered in a mauve carpet that I later learned was the dreaded weed, Patterson’s Curse. The houses, too, were different; often weatherboard with verandahs to the front and back to provide shade from the hot Australian sun. And beside each house there was a galvanised water tank and lots of ramshackle outhouse buildings. Further on, we drove amidst groves of orange and lemon trees and every now and then we went through a small dusty town with a rambling pub on each corner with dogs lying on the deep verandahs waiting for their masters to come outside. At one dilapidated pub there was even a horse tied to the railings, which threw us into great excitement. Along the curbs were dusty cars and fading billboards advertising beer, ice creams, Pepsi, Coca Cola, fish and chip cafés and milk bars. Each town seemed to have a couple of churches and what looked like schoolyards close by. Most of all I remember the smell. Of eucalypt, dust and sheep. And then there were the flies attacking us in swarms, getting up our noses and in our eyes.
‘You swallowed one,’ my mother told me. ‘You nearly choked, until Gill knocked frantically on the cabin window and your father pulled over to the verge of the road and produced an old army issue water bottle he’d bought at a disposal store and you washed the fly down with tepid water.’
Fortunately the Frosts in Morriset had found us a place of sorts to live in, close to Lake Macquarie, and not far from their home in the grounds of the Morriset Mental Hospital, where Dr Frost was the resident physician. However, our new home was more like a garden shed, sitting amongst a stand of raggedy gumtrees on a dusty block set back from the potholed dirt road.
‘It looked as if it was built out of matchsticks,’ my mother laughed recently as we recalled that day we arrived. ‘It didn’t seem much bigger than a caravan.’
Attached to one side of the house was a rusty water tank. A small lean-to porch stuck out from the other side. Built on stumps, with tin caps to stop the ants and termites destroying the wood, it had glass paned windows tacked on as if they’d been put in as an afterthought and the corrugated iron roof was rusting, with the chimney falling apart. There was a small hutchie in the backyard, which we soon discovered was the lavatory or ‘the dunny’ as it was called in Australia. A word my parents never liked us to use…even if ‘lavatory’ seemed far too grand a word for such a building.
‘I don’t know what I thought,’ my mother told me. ‘I think I was in too much of
a state of shock to think anything at all. It certainly wasn’t what I had envisaged. But at least it was a roof over our heads.’ She smiled. ‘Somehow I imagined an Australian homestead with verandahs on all sides and horses tied up to the railing for you all to ride to school on. This was no way it. Certainly not what the brochures had portrayed.’
Inside, the house had a linoleum floor, faded and lifting. A green laminex table, a few chairs with ripped seats, and four steel beds were the odd bits of furniture my father had managed to scrounge. In one corner was a kitchen of sorts with an open shelf underneath the sink displaying a few battered pots and pans and odd bits of cutlery and crockery stacked away neatly.
‘As it only had one room we put a blanket up to divide an area off for your father and me. You children slept on the verandah,’ my mother said.
Sometimes Dibs and Gill went to the Frosts, and Eugene stayed with the St John of God Brothers at the school they ran for disadvantaged boys, nearby. The cheery brothers in their flowing habits were our saviours, along with the Frosts. Brother Celsius was our favourite; however, they were all kind, and some of them were even Irish, allaying our homesickness for a time.
I was dreadfully melancholy once the excitement wore off. Time and time again I dreamed I was back in Ireland sitting on the Aga early in the morning, chatting away to Mary, with the aroma of crispy bacon and a new loaf of Irish soda bread straight from the oven, or going to Powers Cross village with Peggy pulling the trap. I missed Brownie dreadfully and the flies in Australia were worse than the midges in Ireland had ever been. I cried at night and my mother comforted me, but I’m sure her homesickness was much deeper than mine, which tended to disappear when the first glimpse of morning light beamed through my window.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 8