Most summer evenings we’d sit on the front verandah surveying our farm with the distant outline of the Brindabellas blazing in a twilight haze. We were so proud of what we’d achieved in such a short time. The house itself had one extensive living area with high raked ceilings, an open copper-beaten fireplace beneath a towering feature brick wall with bookcases each side and a bar dividing the kitchen from the living area. It also had an archway through to the three bedrooms. One evening, when the house was in the throes of being built, I came home from work and the Greek brickie took me in proudly to show me his work. Unfortunately he was a small, stocky fellow and the archway he’d built was only just high enough for him to walk under. Even I couldn’t go through without bending my head. He seemed somewhat surprised when I queried the height.
‘But yous only gots to dips yours heads the little bits,’ he said, standing under the arch and lifting his hand.
‘My husband is six foot!’
‘Ah. Six foot?’
Suddenly the penny dropped and after much muttering, cursing and throwing around of tools and bricks and mortar, the arch was rebuilt.
Not only did Rob and I paint the outside and inside of the house ourselves, tile the bathrooms and carefully lay every rock in the garden, with Poppy’s help we erected all the paddock’s fencing. Rob also installed the extensive irrigation system around the nut trees over a few weeks’ leave from the army. We worked hard to make our Drominagh our paradise. On returning a few years ago and driving up the avenue between the now-mature walnut and almond trees and seeing the lush haven we’d created it was all worth it. For where the rest of the farms around Drominagh sweltered in yellow grass and dust, Drominagh sat in her separate oasis of greenery.
Our time at Drominagh was a peaceful happy time with many of the Class of ’65, making it their country base. Often on a Sunday the phone would ring and someone would ask: ‘Okay if we bring some lunch. We’ll grab the newspapers too.’
Even the Greek couple that ran our local mini-supermarket at Flynn would come out and cook us up a storm on a stone fire by the creek. Sometimes children would camp down there in tents, staying the night and I’d take them into town the next day when I went to work and dropped Charlotte and Georgie at school.
We had a number of large parties, spilling out onto the verandah, one in particular to welcome me home from six weeks in Ireland with my parents in 1978. Although I was suffering dreadfully from jet lag, having only arrived home the day before, it was great fun, with a band set up on the lawn and a huge barbeque blazing. This was one of the many nights the generator gave up the ghost, only adding to the atmosphere. It was impossible to get electricity connected, so the generator was our only form of power. I often spent hours trying to coax it into life, usually at the end of a long day at the office, before Rob arrived home to take over. It was during this time that my language deteriorated considerably, for it had a knack of stopping right in the middle of dinner preparations or during a great movie or series on the TV, particularly Poppy’s favourite, Fawlty Towers, almost driving him to drink.
Chapter 28
Ireland Revisited
On the last day of my parents’ visit one year, we were sitting on the verandah of our Drominagh, enjoying the late afternoon sun setting behind the Brindabella Ranges, when I said: ‘I’d like to go back to Ireland and see where I was born.’
They thought I was joking. I wasn’t. For quite a few years I’d had a hankering to go back. I hadn’t seen Viv for thirteen years and thought I could incorporate the two. Rob and I’d discussed it at length, and although he wouldn’t be able to get time off work and leave the farm, he was more than happy for me to go and take the girls. So nine months later in early December, Charlotte, Georgie, and I were sitting on a Qantas plane bound for London where we changed to an Aer Lingus flight for Dublin.
In hindsight it was a big ask leaving Rob and Poppy to tend the farm on their own, particularly as it ended up being the hottest and driest summer in Canberra for many years. They had a pretty rough time of it, endeavouring to keep the animals and trees alive in the searing heat with little water, while on the other side of the world we enjoyed a white Christmas in Ireland and then Wales.
Returning to the country of your birth is one of the most comforting feelings in the world. The girls wondered why I was crying, as I looked out of the Aer Lingus window coming into Dublin, when I found it difficult to contain the tears. After the parched paddocks of our Australian Drominagh, the green chessboard fields of Ireland were a welcome sight.
I’ve read that Ireland is a story between you and your heart. How true that is. It’s difficult to explain how I felt. I loved Australia dearly. And she’d been marvellous to me. But in my heart I’d always held a special place for Ireland, although I never for a moment thought of going back and living there. My life and family were in Australia. I didn’t go quite so far as to kiss the ground when I got off the plane as my father did, but I felt like it. Instead I kept my kisses for my parents waiting anxiously for us inside the chaotic Dublin terminal.
After driving over the Liffey River, past St Stephen’s Green where ducks frolicked in the lake, and on through the ancient streets of Dublin crammed with scurrying people and bumper to bumper traffic, including the green buses, I could remember from Bray days, we headed up into the Wicklow Hills for Glendalough. It was wintertime so the trees were bare, giving the countryside a haunting beauty. For three wonderful weeks we stayed with my parents at Cloneen, entertaining relations and family friends, walking by the river, the two lakes and along the windswept beach at Britas Bay. The gift shop was closed for the winter, meaning my parents had plenty of time to drive us around in their small VW beetle, including up to Dublin where we had lunch at Drury’s Hotel and afternoon tea at the Shelbourne. It was bitterly cold, but even that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for being home. There was just something about it that made my heart skip with joy. It’s not as though Ireland looked dapper and sparkling – far from it, with many of the villages drab and unpainted; the people often wearing black beanies and parkers, heads down against the piercing cold. There were far too many young girls pushing prams and young blokes standing on corners smoking and chewing gum. Yet even that didn’t take away from the beauty of the land, and the charm of most of the people.
This was before the Celtic Tiger came to Ireland and the whole country suddenly burst into bloom, with the small villages and towns spruced up and painted the bright colours that they are today. The economy was still pretty much in a depression, although in the late seventies not nearly as bad as in the fifties. Yet unemployment was high and morale often low. But the fields were green, the Guinness good and the shopping in Grafton Street out of this world.
This is when we rented the small whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof in Tipperary where we stayed huddled by the peat fire for a week, venturing out to visit both Drominagh and Clonmoylan or listening to Irish music in the pub next door to the cottage. I remembered nothing of Drominagh from when I was a child. Yet walking through Clonmoylan it was as if I’d never left. There was a new central heating system, but not much else had appeared to change. Standing in the kitchen by the old Aga, I could almost feel the presence of Mary and Brownie; smell a loaf of Irish Soda bread straight from the oven. Walking down the front fields to the lake I could see us all there jumping and screaming in delight, Eugene announcing: ‘There’s not enough room in this lake for me.’
We stopped under the beech tree where we’d enjoyed so many picnics and walked down to the lake. Across on Friar’s Island there appeared to be no goats any more, but the walled garden was still there next to the house and the remnants of my father’s apple orchard still visible. The many years that I’d spent dreaming of Clonmoylan had to a certain extent kept it clear in my mind. I was happy to discover my dreams and memories were much the same in reality. Everything did seem a little smaller, but that is often the way.
Despite the bitter cold it was so beautiful, wit
h a soft mist rising from the lake settling over the rushes on the shore that I wondered why my parents ever wanted to leave. Yet looking at Charlotte and Georgie I realised that if my family had remained in Ireland I wouldn’t have the girls here with me now for I wouldn’t have met their father. I wanted to stay for hours breathing in my youth, taking in every last detail, every stone, every last blade of grass. Sadly, the owners, a kindly Dutch couple, had to be up in Dublin that afternoon and the girls were getting tired and hungry. So reluctantly we said our goodbyes and drove down the avenue to the wooden gate, just as we did all those years ago on our way to Australia.
The next day I got my first glimpse of Drominagh. This day the old building appeared to carry age heavily. Centuries of sun and storms had slightly weathered her face devoid of summer vines, but there was no doubt in my mind that my father would have died a sad man had he not had the opportunity to set eyes on her again. And so would I.
For over two hours we roamed through the house, wandered the gardens and sat by the lake where the girls threw stones into the rushes, as my father and his siblings had once done. And so too Dibs, Gill, Eugene and Viv. I was far too little. When it was time to leave, Helen, the caretaker, insisted we have afternoon tea in the front drawing room. And soon we were sitting around a roaring fire with steaming cups of tea in our hands, as my parents told her of how it had been when they were living there before and after the war.
On the way back to Cloneen we visited many relations from Cork to Kerry, ending up at Ballynastragh where Charlotte took a shine to my elderly aunt, Ethne. For years she and Charlotte wrote to each other. This was the first time I’d seen Ballynastragh and was immediately smitten by her gorgeous lake and surroundings.
With great excitement we waited for Viv to arrive. When she walked through the door at Cloneen it was as if we’d never been apart. She was little changed – still as beautiful as ever, and just as much fun and full of life. It didn’t take us long to fall back into step, although we both noticed I was no longer ‘the little sister’, prepared to go along with everything Viv said. Now I had strong opinions of my own. Together we went up to Grafton Street to shop and drove to Rathdrum a couple of times for the girls to buy warm fur boots, as snow was predicted. In the small bedroom to the front of the house we talked until the wee hours of the morning as we used to do. We also threw a wonderful party at Cloneen for many of our relations and friends of my parents, where my elderly, spritely and fun-loving Aunty Eileen, who’d driven up from Cork with her handsome husband, my father’s brother, Witham, whipped her cocktail dress out of a silk stocking and donned it in a second.
‘If you keep your dress in a silk stocking you’ll never need to iron it,’ she told me with a girlish giggle, as she patted the immaculate blue fabric and fiddled with her beautifully coiffed hair, at the same time ordering me to do up the back zip. I then watched her twirl and flounce in front of the mirror, much like a ballerina, with a whiff of expensive perfume filling the air.
When Viv took off to catch the ferry back to Wales we were sad to see her go, but as we were to have Christmas with her at Cilwych it was only a week before we’d see her again.
Early one morning, with a thick blanket of snow covering the ground, my father, mother, Charlotte, Georgie and I drove to Dublin to catch the ferry to Hollyhead in north Wales. It was a tight squeeze in the VW, with the girls and I huddled in the back seat and my parents in the front. The luggage was tied down tightly on the roof rack. I thought of the time Gill had been in the back seat, as my father and mother drove her to the airport in Dublin. My father, being the gentleman he was, had stopped dead still to give way to a car wanting to merge. Suddenly there was a loud bang as a car hit them from the rear, sending my father’s tweed hat flying off his head. For a while there was a stunned silence in the car.
‘It’s okay Gill,’ my father eventually stammered, putting his hat back on and turning around to make sure she was okay. ‘I don’t think it was a bomb.’
At the time the IRA had been threatening to blow up civilians.
‘It wasn’t a bomb, Daddy,’ Gill screeched. ‘You just got hit in the back by another car.’
‘Ah! Is that all?’
Fortunately there was little damage and they were able to drive on, delivering the car to the garage on their return to Glendalough for repairs.
Driving down through Snowdonia in Wales I felt as though we were in a Christmas post card, with snow sprinkled over the pine trees and covering most of the road. It continued to snow for the next two weeks, meaning we enjoyed a wonderful white Christmas at Cilwych, making snowmen on the front lawns, sitting by the roaring fire in the drawing room or around the huge scrubbed pine table in the kitchen.
Viv and Tim now had two beautiful daughters, Laragh and Dominie, a few years younger than Charlotte and Georgie. It took the cousins a while to get used to each other, but soon they were bosom buddies with the odd tussle now and then. It was interesting to see them together. Viv’s two with dark brown hair and luminous brown eyes, my two with blue eyes and fair hair. It was difficult to think they came out of the same brood, more or less.
For hours I rode one of Viv’s horses through the thick snow up into the Brecon Beacons looking for stray sheep, having to get off every now and then to remove the snow embedded in my horse’s hoofs. The girls and I also helped with marking and drenching of the sheep and cattle down by the sheds near the original farmhouse where Tim’s parents still lived.
In the evenings there seemed to be one function after the other where we drove through the snow to various old homes on large estates. On Christmas Eve we went to a large manor home where I was grabbed for a quick kiss under the mistletoe by the notorious Dai Llewellyn, brother of Roddy, Princess Margaret’s consort of the time. And at every dinner party we went to I tried with all my might to eat green pheasant, (the Welsh like to hang their pheasants until they’re green and gamey) but thankfully Viv and Tim were there to surreptitiously dispose of what I was unable to stomach. Both taste and smell are definitely acquired tastes; not ones I aspire to.
Apart from the wonderful stone cottages Viv and Tim run as tourist accommodation on Cilwych, they also have peasant and clay pigeon shooting. On the numerous occasions I’ve been back to Cilwych since, I’ve helped Viv cook huge pans of curry for a hungry group of Londoners at the end of a day of shooting, after I’d sat for hours in a paddock in the freezing cold, shooting the clay pigeons into the air for the shooters to aim at. Other times I’ll go with Viv on the tractor to help feed the pheasants in the woods.
When it was time to say goodbye, I was devastated to leave. I knew my parents would be coming to Canberra the following year; however, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I’d be able to make the long trip back to Cilwych. It turned out to be quite a while, although over the years I’ve been back many times. I love to stroll down with the dogs through the marzipan fields to the River Usk for a swim or just to skim stones for the dogs to fetch. Or sit on the banks watching the ducks gambol and the trout jumping. In springtime I often ride with Viv through the laneways lined with thick hedgerows where glorious tulips and yellow daffodils have popped up from their winter hiding places, whilst all around us is the merry song of the newly awakened birds as they burst into life after the long cold months. Or we might sit around the wooden tables on the front terraced lawn (beautifully manicured by Tim) watching the sun set above the hills sloping down from the towering Brecon Beacons, where splashes of purple heather, yellow gorse and black and white sheep are etched into the vivid landscape.
When we finally flew into Canberra it was still incredibly hot. Our Drominagh was even drier than when I left, with both dams empty, and the garden parched. But somehow Rob and Poppy had managed to keep everything alive. During the rest of that long hot summer Rob and I canoed down the Murrumbidgee from Jugiong to Gundagai where we camped on the banks of the river, often waking up in the early morning to find a herd of cattle surrounding us as we were camped in
their watering spot. We towed the boat down to the ocean at Bateman’s Bay on some weekends and sailed each Wednesday evening in the twilight races on Lake Burley Griffin. In the winter we went up to the mountains at Thredbo where a group of us stayed in the army lodge. For hours the children romped in the snow on homemade toboggans and a few of the adults skied. In the spring we went up there again to walk through the hills covered in a blanket of wildflowers of every imaginable variety and hue.
Rob did a sailing trip with Josko Grubic on his 80ft yacht, Anaconda, (a contender many times in the Sydney to Hobart race) from Perth to Sydney. Although it was tough he enjoyed it enormously, only increasing his desire to sail further afield than Lake Burley Griffin and down the south coast. And all the time our flock of Angoras flourished, the garden took shape and the groves of almonds and walnuts started to burst into bloom. But even so we were restless. Rob had long since decided the army was not what he wanted in the long term. As his twenty years of service were coming up (when he could retire) we decided to look around for another path for our lives to take.
A friend suggested that we take a trip to his home state of Tasmania. As we still wanted to farm, but be close to the sea so we could sail, we’d thought of moving to the north coast of New South Wales to Coffs Harbour or Byron Bay. However, we decided to take the friend’s advice and go for a trip to Tassie. Rob’s old school mate, Max Doerner, and his wife, Viv (whom we see often, meeting most weeks that we are in Hobart for a Guinness at the Irish Pub in Salamanca), had also just moved there, where Max had purchased an abalone licence.
They told us they loved it and coaxed us into taking a look.
Chapter 29
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 26