by Steve Bisley
The worst time of year was early summer. They would come out of their long winter hibernation, the thick blood in them thinning now as the earth warmed, hungry and nasty. The marshy ground at the bottom of the farm was the perfect environment for them and they grew large and venomous.
My mother was hanging the clothes out one day in early December. The grass around the line was long and needed mowing. Mum had pegged a sheet on the line and was bending to pick up the next one when she saw the snake. It was a king brown, eight foot long and coming at her fast. She barely had time to lift the cane washing basket when it hit. The gaping mouth struck the basket and the venom flew from the front fangs. It came at her again and again, hissing and furious. She managed to keep it at bay till Dad arrived and took its head off with a spade. It squirmed for an hour till finally it lay still.
We used to throw the dead ones on the bull ants’ nests. They’d be picked clean in a week.
I was getting my pushbike from the shed one day to ride to the lake. I heard a thumping sound from the roof above me. There, wrapped around one of the rafters, was a huge python. It must have been over ten foot long and as thick as my thigh. It had a fully grown possum locked between its jaws, and inch by agonising inch it was devouring it. I don’t think I moved for an hour. I watched the possum disappear into the gullet of the snake as it squeezed and crushed it. Even after it disappeared I could still see the shape of the possum inching further through the length of the snake. We didn’t kill pythons because they hunted the rats that plagued us, but that day I wished we did.
God, sport and rock’n’roll
I didn’t think much about God at Lake Munmorah.
We lived so close to the land and our world was so small that we seemed closed off to anything else. Nobody I knew talked about God, certainly no one in my house.
My only contact with religion had been a brief stint at Sunday school, where the only thing we ever seemed to do was colour in pictures of Christ. I always gave Christ a bright red face; it seemed to suit him.
He always had his arms outstretched with his palms facing upwards.
He used to walk around all over the place with those arms outstretched and miraculously he didn’t bump into many people. There he’d be in the middle of a crowd with people cowering all over the place, just trying to avoid those outstretched arms.
I think we were C of E.
I couldn’t find anything to love about Christ.
I loved the Phantom, Mr Walker, the Ghost who Walks.
The Phantom kept things simple.
He loved a horse and a dog.
I think he also loved a girl called Diana, but only at the end of the comic, when things were getting a little slow.
Jesus, on the other hand, loved everybody, listened to everybody, created everything, and generally did too much to be believed. In the same way I had flicked the belief in Santa Claus when I was little, I had to let Jesus go too, because whether you flew around the world in one night delivering presents down a billion chimneys or you could turn water into wine but let four people die on the edge of a highway, in the end it just didn’t wash. Too many inconsistencies. It only worked on little kids.
To me he was just a man with a red face.
My mate Sandy Dickie was religious. His family were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I had met some Jehovah’s Witnesses before Sandy moved to the district.
Every now and then some Jehovah’s or Seventh-Day Adventists would visit our farm to talk about God. I always thought that they were very brave, because nobody seemed to like them, but year after year they would come, their square worn shoes dusty from the miles of walking, smiling through our screen door as my family politely rejected them, again.
They truly believed in God. You could tell just by looking at them. They had a sort of light inside them that shone out. They would take the rejection that they must have known was coming, but you would never see it land on them and hold; they just carried on to the next farm to be turned away again.
Sandy had the same light in him. He never once talked to me about God, but sometimes he’d be gone for weeks with his family and I knew that he’d be walking some country road, smiling through other screen doors and telling people that God would save them.
He was a giant. He was twelve years old and well over six feet tall.
His religion would not allow him to play sport. We had started a rugby league team in the district and we wanted Sandy to be part of it. We were desperate to have him play, so we came up with a plan. We would turn up to his place on game day and ask his parents if he could come out to play with us. We would say we were going to the lake or to someone’s house to do something or other. If we got the okay, we’d get Sandy to someone’s house and get him dressed for the game. It was hard to get shorts to fit him and we couldn’t find boots that came close. So we got some kid’s father’s work shorts and Sandy wore his own sandshoes, that looked bigger than the box they came in, and he was set to go.
He knew nothing about the game, but it didn’t matter; he was a wrecking ball. We would just get the ball to him and watch. He would run the length of the field with half the other team on him, time and time again. Sometimes we’d give him a rest on the sidelines to give the other team a chance to score. We scored so many points in the first half of one game that the other team went home at half-time.
I was okay at footy – not spectacular, but steady, reliable. We called ourselves the Munmorah Red Devils, and played on a field our fathers had cut out of the scrub.
They had also built what was known as the Community Club on land provided by the council. The clubhouse was built right on the edge of the lake. It became a meeting place for the whole community. We used it for dances, wedding receptions, art shows, birthday parties, meetings, anything. One Saturday a month there would be a 50/50 dance at the clubhouse; 50/50 meant there would be a mix of old-time dances – like the Pride of Erin and the Progressive Barn Dance – and rock’n’roll. Everybody came, from little kids to grandparents. It was the only time when the whole community got together.
Between the dances women would gather in groups with little kids wound around their legs and chat over steaming cups of stewed tea.
Blokes hung out at the beer tent and lied to each other and laughed.
Bigger kids ran around the floodlit lawn at the front like dusty moths caught in the glare. Sometimes a fight would break out on the oval, at the edge of the light. The fighters, stripped to the waist, whaled into each other till exhaustion rather than injury halted the show and we all went in to dance again.
I loved the Progressive Barn Dance. Partner after partner coming at you, whirling and leaving, till a favourite arrived in a mist of perfume and heat that wrapped around you and stayed long after she’d gone.
Then the jittery rock’n’roll that made us all go wild with joy.
The Limbo Rock with the bar lowering and people clapping and urging you under, lower and lower till the last contorted body collapsed.
Later, chairs pulled together for sleeping kids. A bloke out the front with his head in hands moans, ‘I think I’ve had enough. Here’s the keys, love,’ and spews. Cups and plates washed in lukewarm water from the last of the urn and racked to drain. Chairs, stacked in neat rows along a wall, while the brooms pushed the night back.
Cars spin in the dew on the oval and honk and weave into the night.
Later still the district sleeps and dreams of fingers interlaced and a broad hand in the middle of a backless dress, of the lucky punch, of a promise whispered for another night when he’s at work and more – ‘If you’re good enough! Well, are ya?’
Diseases and maladies
You could get piles from sitting on cold concrete.
I never knew anyone with cancer.
Lots of old blokes died from heart attacks.
Most kids got measles, mumps and chicken pox and had their tonsils taken out.
Most baby boys were circumcised.
; Some kids got whooping cough and had to go to hospital.
People didn’t suffer from mental health problems. They seemed to just go mad suddenly. One day they’d be fine, the next they’d be eating pet food and licking their privates in the driveway. The big black van would arrive and they’d whack a straitjacket on them, take them to the nuthouse and hit them with a few volts to the brain. They’d be home in a fortnight and manageable for a week.
There seemed to be an awful lot of limping. People rocking themselves from here to there, swaying all over the place; maybe it was the polio.
A kid I knew got polio in the epidemic of 1956. He’d been taken to hospital with a severe burn on his leg from scalding water when he knocked the kettle off the stove at home. He contracted polio in hospital and ended up with a large boot on one foot and ugly callipers on his legs for life.
There weren’t many spare parts around. So if you lost a bit of yourself, it pretty much stayed lost. You’d see the odd wooden leg. There’d be some poor bastard with his ruddy stump strapped to the top of one, clunking around the place. All that was missing was the parrot and the patch.
There were glass eyes. People who had them would just pop them out at night and put them in a glass beside the bed, next to the other glass that held their teeth. Next morning all they needed to do was give it a bit of a lick and pop it straight back in.
Most butchers only had four fingers. If you became an apprentice butcher, they’d cut one off for you, just to make you feel at home.
People never had epileptic fits at home. They’d wait till they were on a crowded bus or in a packed elevator before they’d let rip. I was on a bus in Newcastle when a woman had one. The conductor called for anyone with a pen or a pencil to stop her from swallowing her tongue. I lent him my new Staedtler HB with a rubber on the end that I’d only just bought. When I got it back it had teeth marks all over it and the rubber had been bitten off. I used to give kids a look at it for a bob.
Mum
Mum loved storms. She nearly called my sister Storm. Storm Bisley. It would have been different, that’s for sure.
Anyway, Mum loved them.
The bigger the better, especially the summer ones.
They’d loom out of the south, usually in the afternoon of what had been a really hot day – what country folk called ‘a stinker’.
She took me out once into a greying afternoon. A southerly had freshened and the temperature was dropping when a huge grey squall line unfurled above our house. The sky boiled and darkened. Great thunderheads formed on the southern horizon. Lightning spidered from the clouds, followed by a great whiplash crack of thunder, like something had broken. Then everything went still.
I wanted to race for the safety of the house but I stayed with her. Her face was turned upwards towards the turmoil above us. The lightning was jagged and as white as ice. The thunder started with a sound like splintering and then a great sonic boom that shook the house to the stumps.
She was smiling, even as the first drops splashed down. I stayed for as long as I could bear it and then ran to the shelter of the verandah. I watched her standing in the rain. Her feet were spread wide and her sodden dress clung to her like skin. She was a romantic, a dreamer and a poet, and she needed stuff with power and excitement in it. The storm did that for her. It fired her up. It invigorated her.
Mum kept people at arm’s length. She’d lost faith in love, she’d been hurt and didn’t want to be hurt again, so she closed her heart.
If you tried to get in there, to get close, she’d fold her arms so that her elbows pointed out like two blunt swords. You might get a pat on the head for comfort, but rarely anything else. Nothing close, that’s for sure.
She was a career woman, which was unusual in the 1950s and early 1960s. Women were expected to keep a ‘nice’ home, look after their children and have a meal prepared when their husbands came home at night. Mum did all of that and more. By day she was a teacher at the local primary school. She was a born teacher. She captivated her students with her love of words and her ability to weave stories and fire their imaginations as she taught. At night, she’d make us dinner, help with homework and take care of all the small things that kids need.
Mum was the eldest of nine children. Her three sisters and five brothers were a handsome bunch.
The boys were all robust and the girls had an open beauty about them.
There were two framed photos in our house. One was of my mother as a young woman. She looks like a 1940s movie star, radiant and assured. The other was of my father in his Air Force uniform with a blue military cap placed jauntily on his head. His face had been coloured. There was a blush on his cheeks and his lips were redder than in life. It was a handsome face, and smooth. I could see why they would have been attracted to each other.
After they were married and the war had ended, they, like many thousands of survivors of the war, took their hopes, dreams and fears and scattered them across new horizons.
I don’t know when my father stopped loving Mum and started to love anyone.
I don’t know if he ever loved her at all.
I don’t think he knew what love was.
Dad
I was born into a world of Men.
Of Warriors.
They strode back from the war, the hot yeast rising in their young veins.
Victorious.
‘Look what we have done,’ was their battle cry. ‘We have saved you!’
The question was, who would save us from them?
After their battalions were disbanded they found themselves discharged, unwanted, alone.
All these damaged men.
I knew my father had enlisted in the Air Force in the Signal Corps and had served in New Guinea. He was twenty-one years old. That was all I knew. He never spoke of the war or his part in it. The subject was off limits, taboo. So he sat with it by himself for years and let it seep into him. He owned it and nobody was going to take it from him, and every Anzac Day he marched with all these other men to remember something they were all desperately trying to forget.
We had books about the war at home and I read them carefully in an attempt to find out what it must have been like for Dad.
New Guinea! Kokoda! The humid wetness of the place. They’d gone to that strange foreign land from the dust and heat of home where rain was a blessing, not a curse. To rain that shredded the coconut palms and bogged the camps with mud to the knees. A scratch became a wound in a day in the seeping wet, and ‘dry’ was a memory. Malaria and dysentery plagued them. Their feet rotted in their boots. The dense tracts of jungle encircled them on all sides. They were vastly outnumbered by the Japanese as the main body of the Australian defence force was fighting another enemy on the battlefields of Europe. The Japanese Army had a policy of not taking prisoners in New Guinea and there were stories of captured Australian soldiers being tied to trees in the jungle and used for bayonet practice. Beheading was another favourite tactic employed by the enemy.
I don’t know what my father was like before the war.
I only know what he was like after.
Damaged.
I don’t know what my father endured over there. What he saw, what he did, what he had done to him. I could only imagine.
Lest We Forget. There was no chance of that.
The grans and nans
My father’s mother is coming to live with us today!
We didn’t discard our old people; we kept them like worn shoes.
She’s going to live in my room till she dies!
So I’ve got to bunk in with my sister in doll land. Great.
Nan’s got dementia, which means she thinks she’s a chicken. Maybe I can put a washing-up glove on her head and she can come down to the chook shed and sit with me and Margaret. She doesn’t think she’s a chicken all the time, though; she thinks she’s lots of things. She’s not nuts, just confused. Maybe I should scatter a little cracked wheat around my old room before she arrives, just to make her
feel at home.
I move the last of my Phantom comics and stack them beside the doll’s house in my sister’s room. I leave my six-gun and a roll of caps in my bedside drawer just so Nan doesn’t forget the sacrifice I’ve made for her.
Like with all my father’s relatives, I’ve hardly ever seen Nan. All I really know about her is that she’s old.
We drive to Sydney to pick her up from her house in Manly, not far from the Corso, with its face to the west and its back to the sea. There’s only Mum and Dad and me, so there’ll be room for Nan on the way home. The house is dark brick and squat. A nurse meets us at the door. We go in. Nan’s in the kitchen pouring freshly brewed tea into a pot plant. The nurse rescues the pot and the tea gets poured into the waiting cups. Nan chortles happily and calls me Roger. She thinks Dad is a doctor and wonders who Mum is. I leave the confusion in the kitchen and go for a wander.
There are two ancient Easter eggs in a locked glass cabinet in the living room. Each egg is in the centre of a dusty glass shelf, like forlorn trophies from another time. They had always tempted me on our rare trips to Sydney when I was little. I’d stand close to the dark cabinet, forbidden to touch it, but longing for a taste of them, to feel the chocolate soften and melt and slide on my tongue. The weevils had found them years ago. Their lacy trails crisscrossed each decaying egg to leave them powdered beneath the ageing foil. Everything in decay and dying here.
A piano with yellowing ivory keys.
Tattered velvet curtains dim the daylight to shadows.
Pine cones in a cold fireplace.
Brass candlesticks in shapes of rearing cobras hold the forgotten nubs of candles.
Sepia faces in dark frames stare blankly into the gloom.
Thinly papered walls faded and fading.
My long-dead grandfather haunts me from another lifeless frame. The chain from his fob watch loops into the pocket of a dark vest. Pince-nez glint from the bridge of his aquiline nose. I fart loudly to see if my grandfather’s expression changes. It doesn’t. I fart again, just for fun.