When my father first died there were thoughts my mother would come back to Australia to live. But at that stage she was well in her eighties and getting residency would have been impossible. Viv had wanted her to go to Wales too. But in the end she decided to stay in Ireland where we all visit when we can. Much of the burden of making sure she’s okay falls on Viv, who makes the trip across from Wales at least five or six times a year, however in recent times I too have been going over two or three times a year.
My father never seemed to let things in Reidsdale get him down, which it surely must have. I can imagine the adventure of the big move was now wearing thin and there was left only the dread and fear of being able to provide for us all – so far away from his family and friends.
I remember we prayed a lot. Maybe this helped.
Every night, after we finished the washing up in the rickety sink with a wooden washboard on the side, we knelt on the bare boards in the main room with a log fire roaring in the huge fireplace. Here we leaned against the tattered lounge chairs, reciting the five decades of the rosary with many trimmings on the end. The more depressed my parents got, the longer the trimmings became and the more our knees hurt as we eyed each other through our half-opened fingers with rosary beads entwined.
Without fail we always finished our prayers with the same anguished plea: ‘St Patrick protect us from snakes and take care of us.’
There was of course no television and we only had a small radio. Praying, talking, playing games and reading were our entertainment once it got dark and we came inside. Being the middle of winter, the hours indoors were long indeed, but the burning gum logs kept us warm until we retired to our freezing-cold bedrooms and snuggled under the eiderdowns to hide from the jet planes lurking in the rafters.
My father carried out his duties for Marcus Lyons, building many miles of fences, digging hundreds of post holes by hand and clearing the land of thistles. He dug ditch after ditch and spent hours straightening wire with his bare hands. He never complained, working harder than he’d ever done before and harder than any man half his fifty years.
It was at this stage that it was decided, seeing as I was learning little and came home from school most days in tears, that St Bede’s and I were not suited to each other, so I was taken out of the good nuns’ hands and deposited at the Lyons’ place across the road where Mrs Lyons did her best to tutor me, together with her youngest child, Laurie, also deigned to be better suited to the home classroom amongst the paddocks. Fortunately classes were for only part of the day. The rest of the time I spent with my mother at the post office or with my father toiling and chatting away companionably. With him I learned more than I could possibly have in any history class.
Stopping work now and then to fill his pipe from his leather pouch, he’d lift his hat from his rapidly balding head to wipe his furrowed brow and look out over the endless paddocks. He always seemed to have that worried look, though in later years he told me: ‘My time in the paddocks at Reidsdale was actually very enjoyable as I surveyed the countryside from beside my post holes. If I’d not had the worry of your education I’d have really quite liked to stay there. Tried to make a living from the land.’
As it was, he’d pat me on the head and say how glad he was to have my company for a few hours. Then he’d continue to dig, with me prattling away by his side. My mother would often have made us sandwiches and a thermos of tea, which I’d cart up the hill and later we’d sit on a log under a gumtree devouring it. Quite often I had my grey pony, Timmy, lent to me by the Lyons, tied up to the log as well.
Was I spoiled, whilst the others slogged it out at St Bede’s? Looking back I think so.
It wasn’t long before we children began to love our new life at Reidsdale. As the weather got warmer we swam in the creek at the bottom of the front paddock and built a swing out of a piece of wood and a long rope, which we’d jump off. For hours we’d sit with a piece of meat hanging off a string to catch yabbies. On the side of the creek we’d light a fire and cook them, pulling off their tails. Using a dry twig we’d pull out the delicious meat and dip it in melted butter.
One day we got covered in leeches and my mother, who’d never seen a leech before – let alone a snake – rushed inside to call the local doctor.
‘You must come at once,’ she shrieked down the phone. ‘My children seem to have dozens of little snakes attached to their skins, biting and sucking blood.’
After being reassured by the doctor that we were not going to die and they were in fact only leeches, she managed to extradite them from our squirming bodies by burning a match to the end of each nasty wriggler. A long and laborious job, not to mention painful.
On many occasions we mustered sheep for the next-door neighbour, Peter Bopping who was Mrs Lyons’ brother. He was a weather-beaten fellow who usually had a roll your own hanging from his sunburnt lips and wore a battered bushman’s hat, with corks dangling from the rim. In his hand he carried a shabby leather whip, which he constantly flicked at the sheep. For hours he patiently taught us how to crack it and took us mustering.
I rode my beloved Timmy. Viv and Eugene shared Clown, a Piebald gelding of some fifteen hands. Dibs and Gill managed to borrow horses from Peter and the Lyons. We spent hours sitting around a campfire with Peter, who held us in awe with his tall yarns. He was only in his thirties at the time, but like most Australian bushman his deeply tanned and corrugated face made him appear older. Living on his every word, we eagerly learned more about life in the Australian bush than we could have from any camping book. He made us the best mugs of billy tea, as we perched around the burning coals at the end of a long day’s mustering. We brought our own tin mugs and would wait excitedly for Peter to fill them up and throw us a piece of damper he’d cooked in his camp oven on the burning logs. We learned how to shear and crutch a sheep and some damn good Aussie slang words, which were to be of advantage to us all later on.
Only recently Eugene told me how Peter had taken him into the pub in Braidwood for a soft drink whilst Peter had a well-earned cold beer. The day before, Eugene, driving Peter’s old ute, had run over his prize blue heeler when they were out mustering. Fortunately he didn’t kill the dog and after a quick trip to the vet it was sitting in the back of Peter’s truck, terrorising the locals outside the pub, where Peter was trying to cheer Eugene up.
‘At least you didn’t kill the bastard,’ he said cheerfully, belying the fact the dog was a favourite he’d had for years. Unlike most working sheepdogs, which are relegated to a cold kennel outside, it slept on the bed beside him on the verandah. Needless to say Peter would have been devastated if Eugene had killed the poor mutt.
Eugene remembers a rather dapper fellow, dressed in a tweed sports coat, checked shirt and moleskins, coming over to introduce himself, having heard Peter was the man he needed to organise the shearing of his sheep on the property he’d newly acquired on the banks of the Shoalhaven River.
He removed a fancy Meerschaum pipe from his neatly moustached mouth and held out a hand. ‘James Campbell-Brown,’ he said in a highly polished Scots College accent. ‘I believe you’re name’s Bopping and you’re the good chap I need to shear my sheep.’
There was a moment’s silence whilst Peter looked him up and down. Then he put his beer on the table and removed a soggy roll your own from between his smoke-stained teeth.
‘G’day, Mr Brown,’ he said, beckoning to an empty chair at the table next door. ‘Pull up a chair.’
The man puffed out his chest. ‘The name’s Campbell-Brown, actually.’
A beat of silence. ‘Not a problem, mate,’ Peter said, eyeing him through dust-spattered lashes. ‘In that case reckon you better be pulling up two chairs, eh.’
There were a number of sayings in Australia at the time, which we were unfamiliar with.
My mother got caught out dreadfully when asked to ‘take a plate’ to a function in a neighbour’s house. Imagining the poor lady was short of crockery she took an empty china
plate, much to the amusement of the other wives. Needless to say my mother was mortified.
She also got a fright when confronted with a ‘g’day love,’ by a down and out stranger at her door. Looking flustered and red in the face he told her he needed help as the ‘bloody bomb’ had blown up down the road.
Imagining the IRA or some such Australian radical group were terrorising the neighbourhood, my mother went into a bit of spin, until he explained that he needed some water to fill his car radiator up with.
The next day he turned up to say thank you. I feel he may have been rather smitten with the new postmistress. After a while my mother offered him a cup of tea, thinking he must be lonely. He declined, but asked if she had ‘a cold tinnie’ in the fridge. When she worked out he wasn’t after a tin of baked beans or such he was somewhat put out to find she only had a bottle of sherry in the cupboard, which he declined.
Another time, a neighbour asked my mother if she could mind her children for a few hours, saying before she left: ‘I hope they won’t get in the road.’
‘No, of course they won’t,’ my mother assured her, sounding a bit put out. ‘I never let my children play down on the road. They may get hit by a car.’
The neighbour looked somewhat perplexed, until they came to an understanding that the children would not be allowed to get in my mother’s way.
But the saying that really got her was when she was sitting next to a local farmer at the Lyons’ house. Suddenly he jumped up and said. ‘Hold on a sec, dear, I’m just off to see a man about a dog. You wait here and I’ll top up your drink when I come back.’
As it was about ten o’clock at night she wondered where the man with the dog was and why her companion had suddenly needed to go and see him. Seeing my mother on her own, my father came over and sat down beside her. He asked where the farmer had gone.
‘To see a man about a dog.’
My father looked around. ‘At this hour.’
‘Evidently.’
When the farmer returned my mother asked him how he had got on. How was the dog?
He gave her an odd sort of look and then burst out laughing. ‘It’s a saying we have in Australia when we need to go and relieve ourselves.’
‘I’d never heard such an expression before,’ my mother told me with a laugh. ‘A very odd one indeed.’
We met Steve Forsant, a jovial, bearded gentleman, who owned a horse-drawn brightly coloured wagon. We met him on one of our trips down the Araluen Valley, a beautiful green basin with the sweet aroma of orange and lemon trees filling the air. On the way we stopped on an outcrop of rocks, looking down onto the extensive dale.
My father later said: ‘My memory of this place is the complete silence. In the middle of a hot Australian day, all life seemed to sleep and not even a bird chirped. It was a silence of tangible quality.’
We were having an outing in the Holden. Steve, a barrel of a man (a nun later told my mother he looked the image of St Joseph), was running tearooms overlooking the valley. Being thirsty we’d seen the sign and stopped. Shortly, Steve arrived leading a gentle black horse called Cuddy, who nuzzled her warm nose against my chest. Tying Cuddy to the front railings he removed his bushman’s broad-brimmed hat, patted his long beard and beckoned for us to follow him inside. Whilst my parents told him our story he scurried around his small lean to kitchen, before serving us a banquet of tea and scones with rich clotted cream. The family from Tipperary who’d left all to start a new life in the Australian bush fascinated him, like it did most people at that time. It was the beginning of a lasting friendship.
Recently I drove from Moruya to the Araluen Valley with Rob on our way to Reidsdale, to see how it had fared over the years. Even now the road from Moruya was little more than a dusty dirt track, snaking perilously through towering mountains and hugging the side of the picturesque Deua River. At times I felt as though we were driving on the very tops of the straggly casuarinas and thick firs clinging with all their might to the steep banks. A wrong yank of the steering wheel would see us drop to the river below.
After two hours, lost in a time warp, with the farmhouses seeming much the same as they were back in the 1950s, we came to the Araluen Valley where the orange groves and apple orchards straddled both sides of the road. Now sadly the rich verdant valley I remembered from when I was seven years old was brown and bare from years of drought. Ten kilometres up the steep hill out of the valley, and after passing a herd of cattle grazing on the side of the road (the long paddock) with a modern day stockman astride a fine-looking palomino with mobile phone glued to his ear, we took the turn-off for Reidsdale. Why it is still on the map is a wonder? For there’s little there to tell the traveller they’ve arrived; just a few houses in the middle of nowhere. Brown bare drought stricken fields on a desiccated dusty road. Not much different to when we first sighted it sixty years ago. We stopped at the entrance to what used to be the post office. On the front gate was a rusted horseshoe. Was that the one I remember helping my father nail there?
We drove up to the now deserted and derelict building and stood on the back porch looking out to the fields where I had spent so many hours watching my father digging post-holes. A place where time has stood still. Memories etched into every beam and nail. Every wooden post. Each piece of straightened wire. Every leech and yabby in the river.
And when I stood there in the silence, echoes of the past resounded through the empty rooms. I could almost smell the rich aroma coming from my mother’s Irish stew bubbling in the heavy steel pressure cooker on the fuel stove, and hear the shrill whistle announcing the meal was ready. I could see my mother beckoning us to the rickety wooden table in the kitchen to sit down, my father leaning over to serve out our meal and then saying grace before we started.
As if only yesterday I could hear Viv’s incredulous voice when she came across something new that no-one else had seen. ‘Teeny, come quickly. See what I’ve found! Don’t tell anyone else.’
It might just have been a rabbit hole…a footprint from some unknown animal, or what she thought was the wriggly line left behind by a snake.
I could see Peter Bopping riding up the gravel road. Bush hat on his head. Whip in hand. Cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
I could hear the excitement in Gill’s voice. ‘Here comes Mr Bopping. Saddle up everyone. Have you got your tin mugs?’
Heading up the hill we passed the wooden bridge where Dibs and Gill had crashed their bikes, scaring us witless.
I heard Eugene’s strangled voice as he rushed in to tell my mother what had happened. ‘I think they’re okay,’ he had tried to assure her, his voice quivering. ‘I can see them moving.’
On the way back to Canberra we stopped at the Shoalhaven River, where we’d often gone to cook bacon and eggs on a campfire under a towering weeping willow on the sandy beach after Sunday Mass. I could see my father, legs sprawled, plate on his knee, swiping at the flies. My mother in her pink and white floral dress splayed over her slim legs and her high heels next to her on the sand. I could hear our laughter as we jumped from one rock to another and splashed in the clear water. Picking up a stone I skimmed it across the smooth surface of the river. I watched it jump five times out of the water before it reached the other side.
‘A record,’ I could hear my seven-year-old self scream out in joy.
Last week Dibs and Gill also returned to Reidsdale and Braidwood and met many of the people who remembered us from the 50s. They even went to St Bedes, which looks much the same.
Chapter 13
Moving to the National Capital
Our time at Reidsdale was soon to come to an end when my father secured a job with the Courts and Titles Office of the Attorney General’s Department in Canberra. He and Eugene spent the weekdays boarding there, returning to the post office at Reidsdale on weekends. Eugene had been accepted into the first intake of students at the Christian Brothers College, St Edmunds, in Kingston. He left us one early morning looking very much the young gentleman
in his grey uniform with straw boater hat perched on his proud head. With no house available in Canberra, we girls kept the home fires burning at the post office. We spent many hours on our knees saying the rosary and copious novenas asking for a house to become available. But it took time. Obviously God had more pressing matters on hand.
This was also the year of the ‘big floods’ so he’d quite a lot of protecting to do as well. With the creek having broken its banks we evacuated from the house, under strict instructions from my father and Eugene, who were comfortably ensconced in Canberra.
At least the ‘grass was greener’ when the rains finally ceased.
As you can see the Catholic Church was very much part of my early life. Having been born a Catholic, in those days to have any thoughts of being anything else was touted as ‘definitely likely to end up with one’s soul burning in the roaring fires of hell’. I was not going to contest this belief. And apart from anything else the Esmondes had been Catholics since the Crusades. They’d even been hanged, from O’Connell’s Bridge in Dublin, for their religion. In the 1950s I never thought of being anything else, although today I’ve seen enough bigotry, abuse, sorrow and death in the name of religion to make me rethink.
Like most Catholics, much of my young life was spent in guilt. I fully appreciate those people that still have the faith. Both my parents had enormous faith and at times it has been of great comfort to them. It was particularly to my father during his life and impending death, and to my mother through trying times and in coping with the loss of my father.
Back in 1954 I was praying along with the rest of the family for a home to become available in Canberra. In fact Eugene had been sent up the road and across country to collect a set of holy scapulars that a friend, Billy Maher gave us for that very purpose.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 10