But that first Christmas Beatrice Taylor had been suspended by the Education Department for speaking favourably in public of the Soviet education system. The Beatrice Taylor Defence Committee immediately gathered and I found myself canvassing from door to door around Paddington with my new husband organising a parents’ strike against her suspension. We wanted a hundred per cent abstention of children the day school opened. Paddington, at that time, was a slum suburb. The local Labor league was very far left but there was a strong faction, known as the Children of Mary, of the Catholic right wing. The Education Department was justifiably alarmed. They couldn’t shift Roddy any farther out but they lifted the suspension on Beatrice Taylor.
It seemed a strange beginning to my marriage. Sam Lewis, a burly astute leftist who regarded Roddy as a promising politico, admitted grudgingly that I worked very hard. But I wasn’t serious. So many friends of Roddy’s were serious revolutionaries. You must remember it was 1932. Everyone was expecting the Revolution that never came. Instead there was Hitler.
Of course, in the first years of our marriage, we were, like so many young Australians of our generation, saving up to go to Europe. Australia was a backwater of backwaters. I was forced to send all my earlier books to England to be published because, as Ken Prior told me, they were ‘such a bad advertisement for Australia’.
In those days if you wrote about Australian society as it was, nobody wanted to know about it. I was determined that they were going to know about it. I became so interested in forcing my readers to see the seamier side of our society in the form of fiction that for some years the idea of ‘going overseas’ was buried in a weight of work. Then when we had all our plans made and an exchange teacher arrangement made for Roddy, I found I was pregnant with Benison. No wonder we at first called our beloved Benison ‘the Jinx’.
So we never went ‘where the action is’. In the 1930s instead we stirred up quite a little action where we were. Anyone who held left liberal views was a Red — which was like being a witch in medieval Europe. We were Reds. Our colouration faded with the years until Roddy even refused to vote for the local Labor candidate if he didn’t think he was any good, or even to vote at all. This after years of conducting the ballot in Laurieton as returning officer, while I fed all the scrutineers and leaflet handlers regardless of party. They got hot soup — and as it usually rained they were glad of it. I am now an old yoke-weary apolitical person saying to the young: ‘It’s your world and welcome to it.’ We had done our fighting in the thirties, when we believed that mankind was basically willing to right evils if they knew about them. For a time in the thirties that failed revolution had looked like a possibility. The only thing that defeated it was, of course, the human instinct to let everything go on getting worse until it was too late. So now I just tend my orchard and take no notice of the protestors. What does it matter to the earth — which will heal itself after humanity perishes? I reckon that having come in with the First World War will go out with the Third. The whole of my life has been spent in a world at war.
John Rodd was very different from his tense, workaholic young brother. Roddy was going bald when I married him. He wore glasses. He always wore hats because he was sensitive about his thinning hair. I think he had just used his brains too much and they had worn away the surrounding foliage. Roddy was either exhilaratingly high and good-humoured or, with a change of mood, very dejected and likely to be ill with headaches. John had been the steadying influence before I took Roddy over. No one would actually call me a steadying influence but I soon realised that in a partnership you can’t have two temperaments, so mine had to go. Besides if he got plenty of sun and surf at Manly, he always recovered from his black moods. I, on the other hand, loved inertia and only worked when I had built up a huge load of guilt for not working. I liked going around filling up notebooks but when the actual sweat was on and I had to pound a typewriter and turn out a book, I was like all other writers. I’d do anything else as an excuse not to write. Roddy kept me in line, holding out his hand firmly for the chapter when he came home from school. I turned out a chapter a day. Roddy read it and criticised it.
‘Where’s the homework?’ he would ask. Saving up to go to Europe on Roddy’s meagre salary — teachers were paid much less than they are now — was difficult. I had no intention of being a permanent financial burden but I was so far distant from markets that I had to turn to short-story writing. This was born in on me when I went to see a friend in charge of a radio station, Jimmy Donnelly. He wanted to know where I was living and I said six hundred miles away. ‘Well, hon, that’s just too damned far.’
So I wrote short stories and the first three or four were so awful that they came back promptly with caustic comment. Roddy had read my first novel, which I had written before I married him. He then threw it in the creek. He fished it out again, saying we mustn’t pollute the water, and we took it home and burnt it. I was relieved because I didn’t think much of it either.
Having had all that study of Bulletin short stories for Roddy’s thesis I recognised one when I saw it. I am too lazy to make things up. I had taken a walk to see an old friend, Violet Langdale, who had lived opposite Naomi and myself at East Hills. She had moved after we left and was now living twenty-five miles out of town on her son’s sheep property. She was very psychic and, being German, was troubled by what she saw in the future for her country. ‘Oh,’ she would wail when we went across to eat her tea cakes and have her tell fortunes, ‘there are such terrible things coming to Germany — such terrible things.’ This was long before the Nazis were in their worst courses.
I decided to visit her — naturally on foot. Twenty-five miles was nothing to me then. We were living at the hotel in Coonabarabran and I needed exercise. By nightfall, with my usual blisters, I had turned off the road and was approaching the Langdale farm when I fell in with a young woman on a horse. She was going round her rabbit traps. Her husband was in gaol and she was supporting the children by trapping. I adapted what she told me to a story called ‘Strawberry Jam’, which was accepted by the Bulletin. I kept sending them stories and they published them. It was after we had moved from Coonabarabran to Canowindra that the editors sent me a telegram: ‘We like your stuff. Send us some more.’
But we were poor the first year of our marriage. I had two abortions, going to Sydney for the first one and getting half killed. My new contraceptives were defective. Of course most women would sooner have children but we couldn’t afford children. Later, when we had enough money to support children, we didn’t have any. Not for some years. ‘Two abortions in your first six months of marriage,’ my doctor exclaimed years later. ‘Good Christ on the roof.’
I explained: ‘We couldn’t afford children. We were broke.’
It was the grimmest year of the Depression, and men were starving on the roads — many with families. Come Christmas, the two of us and the local Labor League decided that Coonabarabran would be one place where everyone for one day of the year was fed. We hired the hall of the Mechanics Institute so that all the men on the track and their families should be fed there, but we had to raise the money somehow, not only for this but for the Christmas hampers that were to go to every family in the town on the dole.
We decided to hold a dance to raise funds, and a big, stout, jolly woman called Mrs McLean, the wife of the local Labor leader, went round with her kids and myself tagging along from door to door making a collection. She was a wonder, that woman. Just before Christmas she decided that the real money was over at Baradine thirty miles away, and she and I got a lift over so that on Saturday, when the sleeper-getters came in to spend their pay, we were there to ‘bite them’.
The streets were thick dirt and the grey scrub came up to the town in a blazing heat belt. It seemed to me that I had made a mistake getting married. Mrs McLean, however, beamed like a female Santa Claus. She was counting on the take. Saturday afternoon was ghastly. I was expected to stand outside the hotel and buttonhole every man who went in. Mrs McLean retir
ed to the bar parlour and took off her shoes. She did quite well there.
I drank nothing stronger than lemonade and had some difficulty politely refusing the friendly sleeper-getters, all bent on celebrating. I was still not used to asking strangers for money, but I was doing very well with the recklessness of the very shy girl who is making an immense effort. The money came rolling in and Mrs McLean emerged now and then to see how I was doing.
By nightfall I only wanted to get off my feet. I had to rush home and go to the school farewell dinner to those leaving — to join the unemployed, in most cases. I was so savage at all I was learning about poverty that I made a speech instead of the recitation that the headmaster announced I would deliver. All the best people of the town were attending that dinner in the Greek café and when I got fully worked up the headmaster put his head down in his hands and groaned, but the unemployed gathered in the street outside the café door and cheered. Later, the headmaster said he would denounce me at the prize-giving, and my husband didn’t improve matters when he applied for a transfer on the grounds that ‘the relations between the headmaster and my wife’ made his position on the staff untenable.
The dance was announced for eight o’clock the following Saturday. I was at the Mechanics Hall promptly at eight. It was dark and silent, nobody there. I was in a panic. Had I come on the wrong night? What had happened? About a quarter-to-nine Mrs McLean rolled down in her leisurely way. She had forgotten to tell me that nobody took any notice of the eight o’clock on the ticket. By nine-fifteen they were beginning to roll up and at midnight everyone was pressing into the rear of the hotel which was roaring with thirsty dancers. I drank one sherry to be sociable and it nearly laid me unconscious. I don’t know yet what they made it of. Mrs McLean declared the dance a great success. I still only wanted to rest my feet.
During the week, while we were in a store collecting, a group of Aborigines came up to me and asked if they were to be included in the Christmas dinner. Mrs McLean was firm with them. ‘We are workers, too,’ they protested sullenly. No, Mrs McLean said, they must go to the government station. She assured me when I took their side that it was on account of my city ignorance. They would be well fed at the station. ‘It isn’t that,’ I insisted. ‘It’s just not belonging.’ I never forgot their faces when they said, ‘But we are workers, too.’ It was part of my ignorance that I never observed the iron colour bar and was just as ready to talk to the dark people as to anyone else.
Where Mrs McLean scored was in her knowledge of every family in the district. Two days before Christmas Day this was demonstrated when we had a windfall. I had a frantic telephone call from the wife of the bank manager. She had heard that the schoolteacher’s wife was mixing with all the worst elements in the town because she was a Red. As president of the Country Women’s Association she had suddenly been landed with cases of fruit sent from the city for unemployed families in Coonabarabran and round about.
‘The trouble is,’ she explained, ‘none of us would have the faintest idea of who to give it to. We just don’t know these people.’
Mrs McLean and I swooped down on that fruit. She had a truck organised. The butcher was keeping our meat for us. The rector had begged whole sides of mutton from the graziers and the butcher hewed it into joints for us. We had grocery donations from the stores, jellies, sweets for the children. And now we had the fruit. Mrs McLean gave the directions and I packed. It was all done casually on the littered back verandah of the McLean home, with kids everywhere. Every family on ‘relief’ would get a Christmas ‘hamper’, a full sack of food.
Then Mrs McLean got into the front seat with the driver, I perched on top of the bags, and we set off for tiny holdings away from the road that only Mrs McLean could find. I never knew before that lean families with children as shy as bush animals were living in humpies with mud floors, saplings supporting leaky iron roofs. In one place the kitchen table was wooden slabs set on timber supports driven into the earth floor.
This was the unknown poverty which hides away. The eyes of those children when they saw the fruit — peaches, plums, apricots, oranges! They never came into town. They hadn’t any means of getting there. Their meagre supplies would be delivered to a roadside box, and they had to tramp to the box. My respect for the stout Mrs McLeans of country towns was fixed forever. From that day onwards, I knew that in any country town, where I might be, there would be one Mrs McLean, shrewd, knowing everyone, stout, unhurried. She was the woman I always sought out for a friend.
Christmas Eve, my husband and I went to the midnight service at the rector’s little church. Then we hurried down to the Mechanics Hall and peeled potatoes and pumpkin for the Christmas dinner for the travelling unemployed. The word had gone along the track that Coonabarabran was turning it on for the travellers on Christmas Day. We were not, I think, popular with the police sergeant; for every man on the track for a hundred miles around had been making our way. The old wooden hall with its trestle tables was crowded.
We had two barrels of beer, one from each publican. We had — I think the temperature was only a hundred — an enormous roast dinner. I didn’t eat any because I was waiting on the tables. The worst of it was that these men were so overwhelmed that on one day of the year people should think of them.
I was allowed, by Mrs McLean, to make a little speech. She had smilingly decided that although she had done all the important work, the men would like me to reply to the vote of thanks they passed.
‘Just don’t be grateful,’ I remember saying, ‘People owe each other kindness — not just one day of the year. We owe it to each other all the time.’
I was very happy, even with my feet aching so. I was very glad I had married and come to the bush.
* * *
At Canowindra, our next town, Roddy was very popular with our charming Ma De Lisle who ran the hotel where we had a room. He went with her to the early morning service at the local church. I was more popular with all the maids because I read teacups or hands. I kept telling my sister, to her disgust, before World War II that there was nothing in her future but ships. She didn’t believe me until she joined the Navy.
It was just after we moved to Canowindra that Roddy announced he was giving me up for Lent. An evil smile spread across my face and he realised at once what he had done. Let him, in future, refer to the time I had mistakenly sent to the auction his first edition Australian paperbacks when he left me in Coonabarabran — I would murmur, ‘I’m giving you up for Lent.’
‘You have the memory of an elephant,’ he complained.
Nevertheless, after the Easter holidays, it struck me it would be a good idea if I stayed down in Sydney instead of luxuriating in the Canowindra Hotel. So I offered my services to a group George Bateman was running called the Labour Defence League. George was an old IWW man — a stocky, sandy-haired, North of England rebel, with a nice wife and a large family. He had been in quite a few gaols for his politics in the old country. Naturally we got on splendidly because I worked. When someone complained to George that a cadaverous grey man was a police spy George said: ‘Yes, and he has to work three times as hard as everyone else just to prove he isn’t.’ George didn’t mind this man being a police spy.
In and out of George’s office above Pellegrini’s, with its crucifixes and sacred statues in the window, flowed the tide of human woe. Cast-off de facto wives, evicted families, deserted children, the bereaved, the aggrieved, the penniless. And George had a whole cast of hard cases besides myself and the police spy to deal with them. We lived on meat pies.
George was very proud of me and took me down to the nearby Communist Party headquarters and signed me up. As one of the great joiners I didn’t mind. I wrote to Roddy announcing my new membership and received back a blast of red-hot wrath. His views of the Communist Party, I discovered to my surprise, almost approximated to those of my father.
George Bateman’s alliance with the Communist Party was as short-lived as mine — almost. I was standing in the D
omain at the beginning of World War II and George was on his soap box passionately denouncing the Soviet Union for its alliance with Hitler. There were two laconic party types behind me and one said to another, ‘There’s a man you could put against a wall and shoot.’ The other agreed. George and I had both found out that while you were useful to them the comrades would accept you and take what they could get out of you. When the situation changed and you showed any disagreement with the sacred Party Line from Russia they were quite willing to shoot you.
I had interviewed a group of girls who had been shipped out from England to Australia when they thought they were going to Canada. In Australia there was no work for them and some of them were on the streets, in maternity homes and having a sad time of it. With my usual effrontery I sought them out. I also went around most of the solicitors in Sydney asking our chances of free legal help. This was before the days of Legal Aid. It surprised me how many were willing to help us. There was one sandy-haired solicitor who was attached to the Defence League who explained to me the science of line-ups. ‘O.K. So your man is in a fight with the New Guard and he’s dressed in old working clothes. Comes the line-up he’s clean-shaven, dressed in a suit, beautifully smart. The chap in bandages goes along looking for an unshaved unemployed, slouching layabout. “Oh no, he wasn’t the one who bashed me.”’ Punch-ups between the New Guard and the Left were pretty usual in those days.
One morning George was sitting in the office reading the newspapers with some disgust. ‘Look at that,’ he snarled. ‘Here’s a judge in the Northern Territory who’s just condemned some Abo to death for spearing a man who was a criminal under his tribal law.’ George and I looked at each other and full blown between us arose the idea of the Defence Committee for this Tukiar condemned to death. I was the cultured voice on the telephone who rang many eminent people asking them to speak on behalf of this rude savage. It was strange how many eminent people were fed up with reports of police massacres of Aborigines or dusty lines of them being chained together with the policeman riding on a horse in front. Roddy, who had simmered down by this, came back for the mid-winter holidays and got a group together to hire the Town Hall for a Sydney meeting.
The Missing Heir Page 14