When we first moved to Tasmania some twenty-five years later, I took part in the Taranna Gymkhana on the Tasman Peninsula and again won a first prize – mainly due to the fact that my horse, Devil, was the only horse who could be persuaded to go backwards when asked. Or, as Rob unkindly suggested, the ruddy-faced judge was Irish and possibly took a fancy to me, being the only woman in the event.
Back in Canberra, Dibs had Kinsale, a 16-hand bay that she won many events with. Gill did much the same on Aaron, a stunning white Arab, not the easiest horse to handle, bolting once through the streets of Canberra with Gill on board. Often Viv and I would ride our horses home, tying them up in the back garden, where we’d have lunch. Then we’d ride back to the stables again in the afternoon before walking home through the paddocks and suburbs, often in the dark. It never crossed our minds that our parents should pick us up, or if it did, they would have been far too busy to be able to do so. Other times we’d ride over to ICEM, the immigration government office where Gill worked and have lunch with her or visit Dibs at St Peter Channel’s Primary School in Yarralumla where she taught a lively class of kindergarten children. Occasionally we’d persuade Eugene to come riding, but on the whole he was more interested in playing rugby or competing in athletic competitions, where he excelled at hurdles.
Gill also met her future husband, Colin, a crack show jumper in Canberra at the time. Over fifty years later he’s as divine as ever.
They first met when Gill was trying to put the bridle on Aaron and he was refusing to co-operate.
‘I wouldn’t be doing it like that,’ Colin said in his wonderful long Australian drawl, walking up and taking over.
Now they live in Tamworth in New South Wales where they’re both involved in the Riding for the Disabled, after retiring from managing a Santa Gertrudis cattle stud, Hardigreen Park at Wallabadah, during which time Colin became President of the Santa Gertrudis Association of New South Wales. Last time I was in Tamworth with them we went to the magnificent new Equestrian Centre where we watched the Australian show jumping trials. I’ve never seen such an impressive array of riders and horses in one venue before. Gill and Colin went on to have four beautiful children, Andrew, Allison, Mia and Liam. Like Rob and I, they have five grandchildren. Colin is the only member of our family who refuses to call me Teeny.
‘You were given a perfectly good name, Rosemary, so I’m going to use it.’
After breaking the heart of a few Canberra fellows, Dibs married Peter, an archaeologist and moved to Dunedin in New Zealand, where she joined him on isolated digs. It was such an adventure that her photo made the front pages of the Women’s Weekly. Not long after leaving school (where she’d be the first to say she didn’t excel) she discovered teaching was her calling. For over thirty years she was a marvellous success (particularly with gifted children for which she did a thesis and won a number of awards), until she retired to Gippsland in Victoria where she runs a highly successful business, Glendalough Park Cattery and Kennels with her gorgeous second husband, Kevin. For years she was on the local council and is still on the tourist board for the area.
Back in Canberra in the 1950s, school holidays were often spent on droving and camping treks. Mrs Lew would load up a Clydesdale horse with billy cans, swags and tins of food and take paying guests on a trek through the mountain ranges. Often the paying guests were children of overseas ambassadors who wanted their children to experience life in the Australian bush before returning to the confines of their concrete jungles.
Somehow Mrs Lew always managed to find a spare horse for the Esmondes, at little cost if we would pitch in and help. We’d make up our own swags with our clothes and sleeping bags (lovingly made by my mother out of old army surplus), which we’d carry on our horses, together with leather saddle-bags filled to the brim with our own tin plates, knives and forks and a steel water bottle.
We were an impressive sight, riding through the streets of the classier suburbs of Canberra, Mrs Lew to the front on her seventeen-hand grey gelding, her daughter, Jan, not far behind, leading the pack horses. Then all of us would be bringing up the rear, with our saddle-bags and water cans dangling off our newly polished saddles. We wore large brimmed felt hats with corks, just like Peter Bopping in Reidsdale, to ward off the flies. Quite often people came out to their front gardens to wave us off, even as we rode through Mugga Way, brimming with large mansions and embassies, down Mugga Lane and out into the sunburnt countryside towards the small village of Tharwa and up to the Goodradigbee mountain ranges.
Most of the nights, were spent in various shearers’ quarters, like those at the historic Lanyon Station, which was first occupied following white settlement by the ex-convict, Timothy Beard, who was transported to Australia for life in 1806. After Beard was evicted, James Wright and his friend John Lanyon also settled as squatters. When Lanyon returned to England, Wright stayed on with his large family and a workforce of convicts before he got into financial difficulties and was forced to sell Lanyon and move to the nearby station of Cupacumbalong, where we also camped.
Lanyon, now owned by the government, was, for many years, the Sidney Nolan Gallery and is a tranquil haven on the perimeter of the Canberra suburbs.
In the 1950s we had gymkhanas involving the local children in barrel and flag races. We’d help with mustering or shearing sometimes. At night, singsongs were held around a huge campfire on a riverbank with the sound of a lone guitar and our young voices rising upwards to the spectacular Brindabella Ranges, as though we were in a huge amphitheatre.
Often I watched in awe as romances took place. One of these was between the beautiful blonde daughter of one of the more prominent ambassadors to Australia and a good-looking rough and tumble shearer working on one of the sheep stations we’d camped on down by the river. It was quite a ‘hot affair’, often conducted behind the bushes in the dark of night and out of Mrs Lew’s sight and hearing. Not ours, however. Needless to say, after the illicit romance was discovered, the poor girl was immediately plucked from our midst, never to join the riding treks again. She was shipped back to her home country to continue her education in a style more suited to her background.
In the mornings we’d get up early and light a fire to cook breakfast and boil the billy on a wood fire. At night it could be a walloping stew, or if we’d been lucky enough to score meat from one of the sheep stations it might be a barbeque on a grate over the fire. I remember we drank tinned pineapple juice and large quantities of sweetened condensed or powdered milk and lunch was often cracker biscuits smothered with Vegemite or cream cheese. One of the boys got bitten on the behind by a snake when squatting with the call of nature, but after a hasty trip to the Canberra Hospital he survived. I fell in love with a young fellow with a great singing voice, who serenaded us with bush ballads, and owned a large black horse, although in hindsight I think it may have been the large black horse I fancied most. Not true!
Endless hot summer days ran blissfully into each other as we galloped over rocky streams, through acres of parched overgrazed paddocks, climbed steep stony mountains; scrambling down the other side, with our hair streaming in the hot wind; our bush hats flapping up and down on our fly-covered backs. And then all too soon it was time to head home. Reluctantly we would trek back along the dusty roads, through Naas and Tharwa, finally clattering into Acton where we’d stop at the hospital canteen and gulp a freezing cold ‘spider’ down in seconds, relishing the tangy taste of lemonade and ice cream sliding down our parched throats. After a final wash and rub down of the horses, we’d lead them across the road, letting them loose under the towering weeping willows on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, before stopping to gorge ourselves with luscious ripe mulberries off the ancient tree near the gate.
Bobby Llewellyn was later rewarded in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her service to the equestrian industry and the youth of Canberra. I can think of a no more deserving person to be so honoured. When she died we all mourned her loss, but particularly Gill, who�
��d kept in constant contact.
My father made ends meet with his job in the public service, plus a milk run in the morning, (which we often helped with) and overtime at night. Later he became a proofreader with the Canberra Times and then the Australian newspaper when it first started. At weekends he delivered bread. This was all a long way from being ‘the squire’ at Drominagh.
At Christmas time on the milk run, most of the customers would leave my father a present: chocolates, bottles of whisky, or other alcoholic offerings (which, if I was helping, I’d have to immediately confiscate in case they were a temptation) to put under the Christmas tree. In the winter it was pitch dark and freezing cold. Morning after morning my father hauled himself out of bed at four-thirty and started his run, pulling his wooden trolley from one house to the next.
‘He used to carry a ruler to fight off the dogs,’ my mother recalled with a laugh.
At first my mother managed to get a job as a cleaner at the Australian National University at night. I know how humbling this was for her, but both my parents worked without complaint, bringing much needed money home. There were, after all, seven mouths to be fed.
For a short period my father tried his hand at being a Massy Ferguson tractor salesman out at Yarralumla. He ended up working at the Department of External Affairs as his day job, which he had for many years, before retiring and starting his own business, Braddon Flyscreens, having realised flies were a ‘darn nuisance’ and no-one in Canberra seemed to have come up with a satisfactory solution. It was a roaring success, bringing him enormous satisfaction and some well-earned rewards. Mind you it should have, for it was incredibly hard work. Particularly in the summer months, when he’d start at the crack of dawn and finish late into the evening, making and fitting each and every fly screen window and door himself, working out of the garage of our then-home in Ijong Street. Soon, to his great satisfaction, he was earning more than the Department Head at his old public service job and had opened a small factory in the industrial area of Fyshwick.
After the cleaning jobs – and later as a proofreader with the Attorney General’s Department – my mother secured a job as a casual at David Jones Department Store, working in different sections and enjoying it on the whole.
‘Except when I was in the bakery section and had to wear a white starched baker’s hat,’ she told me recently with a wry chuckle. ‘I found this a bit humiliating.’
Looking back, I’ve the greatest admiration for them both.
Steve Forsant came to stay in his covered wagon pulled by his ever-patient horse, Cuddy. He set up camp on the government nature strip across the road from Condamine Street. Each night he built a roaring campfire, which we all crouched around as he told us yarns of his past. Amazingly no-one asked him not to light the fire or to move on.
After a few months he did move on – to Hall, a small village just north of Canberra, where we visited him often at his makeshift campsite. Then he and Cuddy wandered further north. He was not an old man, but with his long grey beard and rotund build, he seemed ancient to us children. Years later he reappeared, asking my parents for some money, which, although short themselves, they kindly gave him.
‘After some rough times he made good in a new life in central New South Wales,’ my mother told me, fingering a photograph of him and Cuddy in the album at Cloneen. ‘A few years later he sent us money to build a roof onto the ex RAAF hut, which doubled as Eugene’s bedroom. Then sadly we never heard from him again.’
Before Steve set up camp opposite our house, he took over the running of the post office at Reidsdale. Dibs on her horse, Kinsale, and Eugene on his new bike, decided to pay him a visit. It was mid-summer, with the temperature soaring. They were to spend the night at Bungendore, a small town about halfway between Canberra and Braidwood. No-one seemed to think this was unusual – that two young teenagers should take off like this on their own, on a sixty mile journey – on one of the hottest days Canberra had experienced in years.
After the first twenty miles or so Eugene took refuge in a large clay pipe, refusing to come out till it got cooler. I don’t blame him. Fortunately a neighbour from Reidsdale, Tubby Clarke, a knock-about bloke, happened to pass by in a ute. For some reason he was leading a horse from his window – a slow mode of transport. As he was also heading for Reidsdale, he suggested Eugene trade the bicycle for the horse. This Eugene did without much coaxing, for anything seemed preferable to pedalling his bike up the huge hills in temperatures like that.
Before leaving them, Tubby warned Eugene he should watch out for one of this horse’s nasty habits of pigrooting. Eugene decided this was a cheap price to pay and was prepared to take the risk. On they trudged to Bungendore (Eugene surviving the odd buck from the errant horse), where they spent the night in on old barn at the back of a rambling house. Next day they limped into Braidwood after stopping at the Shoalhaven River to give the horses a swim. The day after that they followed the route our school bus used to take, arriving at Reidsdale to find Steve Forsant waiting for them at the post office.
Dibs headed home on Sunday, while Eugene stayed on for a couple of weeks with Steve. We set out to meet Dibs, finding her between Braidwood and Bungendore, with tears streaming down her face, as she was convinced we’d all perished in a car accident.
‘In fact the reason we were late meeting her was that Mass had dragged on longer than usual,’ my mother told me. ‘I must admit if I’d known she was going to get so upset we’d have got up and left before communion, even though we were right up the front.’
I still have a vivid memory of driving towards Dibs, lumbering along on Kinsale within a thick shroud of pale dust.
‘God knows why we decided to do it,’ she laughed, looking back to that trip, as we sat in her living room at Glendalough Park in Gippsland, with a roaring fire in the grate where her elderly cat, Victor Hobart, (who she and Kevin acquired after a visit to us in Hobart) lolled in front of the flames. ‘It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. And I don’t suppose in those days it was all that unusual to ride such a long distance. But it was very hot.’
Later, when she finally plodded into the dusty stables at Mrs Lew’s, tired and worn out, my parents decided such outings, although perhaps suited to the Irish climate, were not quite as appealing in the searing heat of an Australian summer.
Chapter 14
Ijong Street…Not Drominagh but Ours
In 1957, we moved to 5 Ijong Street in the suburb of Braddon, not far from Condamine Street. We’d been waiting for a government house that we could eventually buy to become available ever since we’d arrived in Canberra.
Ijong Street again was not Drominagh nor Clonmoylan, but it was ours.
On a large corner block, opposite an extensive break of pines, known as Haigh Park, with a huge pine tree of its own right next to the house, it was a site my father had coveted for some time. Built out of monocrete, the house comprised a large kitchen where we could all sit around the table at a squeeze, a separate living room, a dining room of sorts and three double bedrooms and one bathroom. Most importantly of all it had a sun deck at the back, making up for the fact that the small kitchen and bathroom windows faced the front, giving the house an unattractive appearance from the street. Later my father covered the front in Virginia creeper, disguising the pipes and small windows somewhat, although it would never be anyone’s idea of a beautiful building.
I remember the day of the move. First of all we had to shift Eugene’s bedroom – the old issue RAAF shed my father had erected in the grounds of Condamine Street. For the move it needed to be cut in half, put on a large truck, and then reassembled in the back garden of our new home. This is where Eugene and Porky slept. God help anyone of us who visited without letting Porky know. Dibs and Gill shared a bedroom and Viv and I the other.
Much later on we were to discover that Porky’s greatest trick was to wait until we’d all left the house, whereupon he’d scratch the dirt under the pine tree until he had a mound to la
unch himself over the paling fence and disappear for the day. He would always be back behind the gate before we came home in the evening, sand hill dismantled, until the same thing happened the next day.
‘It was only when I came home from work early one afternoon,’ my mother laughed, ‘that I discovered this happening. I watched him jump back into the garden and knock the mound down before running to the wooden gate to be there to welcome me home.’ She shook her head. ‘He was as cunning as a fox…but didn’t realise I was already inside watching his antics.’
We set the ‘hut’ as it became known, down in this barren half-acre of dirt and then proceeded to bring the rest of the furniture from Condamine Street. We’d only brought small pieces from Ireland, including the broken china, silver and other odds and ends, an onyx and ivory crucifix within a glass dome and the statue of the Virgin Mary, both of which were installed on the mantelpiece beside the fuel stove. Numerous portraits of our regal ancestors were ceremoniously placed on the wall in the small hallway. Father Prendergast, a gregarious Irish priest, with an impenetrable ‘west country’ brogue and wit to match, helped us carry the huge fridge we’d brought from Reidsdale. The oblong cedar dining table, with an extension my father had picked up at a disposal auction, rather dwarfed the area to which it was allocated. Over the years we lived at Ijong Street, we spent many a night sitting around this table celebrating birthdays, Christmases and entertaining visitors. Later, when television arrived in our world, the TV lived on the end and was ceremoniously removed to the ground when we had visitors.
We’d also acquired a rather dilapidated lounge suite, which my father proceeded to do up and respring. But his biggest triumph of all was the hall table we called the ‘invention’. This my father made in such a way as to double as an ironing board. He had removed the top of a wooden sideboard and attached an ironing board to the underside. When one wanted to iron you just had to find another member of the family to help turn the top upside down and there you had it. When one finished ironing, the idea was that it would be turned the other way round and a vase of flowers put to rest on the top to welcome visitors.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 12