The beer consumption amazed me. I had never seen either of my parents touch alcohol. The Staggs and Stewarts, both men and women, swallowed copious amounts, supplying them with enough raw material to build impressive bottle walls, which for a while I was fooled into believing was the purpose of all the consumption. They took offence at my suggestion they drank too much.
Aunt Gerty was my favourite. She was a stout woman (in dimension as well as her choice of beverage) with a majestic bosom and blue-rinse hair. I liked her thunderous farts as she got up every morning. Her beer farts, she called them nonchalantly, as if they were as natural as the rising sun. They put me in a good mood for the day. She was raucous and always had something outrageous to say that raised the hackles of her husband or whoever happened to be around. Often someone dropped by and stayed the whole day, or at least until the beer ran out, which was a rare, traumatic occurrence that was in danger of transforming the mood of the entire neighbourhood, unless like a miracle a guest had an emergency stock in a car boot. Sometimes, when the beer was flowing, Aunt Gerty would play ditties on the upright in the lounge room while others sang along. If I was around she would sneak me chocolates and kisses. She liked to ruffle my hair, tangle her bejeweled fingers in it and tug until I protested. For reasons that still elude me she used to call me ‘Butch’ or ‘Butchyboy’, so often that others in the tribe, including my mother, adopted it. Perhaps she misjudged my character or her intention was ironic, but usually when she said it, she put a sweaty hand around my neck, drew me into her bosom, where I was in danger of suffocating, and chuckled while I squirmed.
“You’re a good kid, Butchyboy. You love your Aunt Gerty, don’t you? Then you look after your mother now, for me, okay? You be strong, won’t you? She’s going to need a good man in her life, not like that mongrel father of yours. You know he’s a no-hoper, don’t you, Butchyboy? Good riddance to bad rubbish we say, don’t we?”
She must have known something about my father that I didn’t know. If she did, she never bothered to enlighten me. But ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ meant only one thing to me—gone for good. My heart constricted.
Aunt Gerty and Uncle Mick had three children. Rory and Ann had already left home and started families of their own. Brenda their baby was probably a mistake since she was more than ten years younger. She was about the same age as Jean but that was where the comparison ended. She was proudly dumb, conventionally pretty and immensely popular in the neighbourhood, especially amongst the boys who followed her around, played in the yard with her or went exploring in a thornbush paddock opposite the house.
Jean was pretty too but in a sisterly way. She and I often tagged along and were only tolerated because we were related. We could have played with our other cousin, Don, but he was a year younger than Carol and so of no consequence. Besides, he was an odd boy whose best friends lived inside his head. We weren’t offered cigarettes or taken into secret cubby houses like Brenda but allowed to play hide-and-seek or Cowboys and Indians when they were short of Indians. And once, as a reward for dying several times in Custer’s Last Stand, I was invited to spy on Aunt Gerty’s bum through the nightsoil-man’s portal at the back of the outdoor dunny, an offer I was too terrified to accept.
Pat enrolled Jean and me in the Portland Primary School. It was a red brick school not unlike the one I’d attended briefly in Launceston, with a smaller bluestone building in one corner, officially the first school in Victoria, which had become the art room, full of riotous paintings and swirling mobiles.
I remember my first day at the school, the harsh expanse of asphalt and a lofty classroom with rows of identical desks, a chalky blackboard, gawking students, some whose paths I crossed time and again as I was growing up without becoming a close friend of any (except Marty and that wasn’t until my teenage years). And, ah, yes, there’s my mother retreating, with reassuring words and a tentative wave goodbye, looking wistful in a summer frock and brand new white-framed glasses, her hair as scalloped and fixed as the coiffure of a marble bust. I felt abandoned but I understood even at such a young age that I had to be stoical about it. She too had been abandoned and now she had to find a job.
It was well over halfway through the school year, so I was considered an intruder by the rest of the class. Yet with a routine imposed upon my days I soon felt more at ease. I willed my father out of my thoughts, convinced that he didn’t care for us any more, if he ever had. In class I became a model student, reading aloud upon request, doing my sums diligently, chanting the times tables with my classmates. But at lunch I ate alone in a crowded shelter shed, intently focusing on cheese and Vegemite sandwiches.
Soon Pat had work for the first time since her marriage. Aunt Gerty and Aunty Barb managed to secure her a position as a maid at the Mac’s Hotel.
The hotel was a grand old double-storey bluestone building painted white, with balconies and wrought-iron lacework, an erstwhile Cobb & Co terminal close to the foreshore and opposite the post office in another historic building where Uncle Mick worked. Pat made the beds and cleaned the guest rooms upstairs. But then my aunties tried to induct her into their own occupation one evening when the hotel was short-staffed for a private function. The only mixed drink Pat knew was a shandy. She made mistakes, reversing the ratios of mixed drinks, pleasing the guests but not the management.
Realising the futility of training a teetotaller as a barmaid, Gerty steered her away from the hotel industry, into another cleaning job, this time working in an historic Portland mansion.
The owner was one Angus Campbell, a proud member of the Western District squattocracy and an ex-member of the Senate in the Menzies’ Liberal Government, which I was informed at a young age happened to be the enemy of all hard-working people throughout the nation. The mansion had been built by one of the early settlers in the district. But Pat and Aunt Gerty, who accompanied her initially, disregarded its significance and grandeur to talk about how idle the rich were. How untidy and thoughtless they were around the house! One thing my mother couldn’t abide was the notion that certain matters were beneath the dignity of some, while for others like her, it was their lot in life. She saw some irony in old Angus donating the Campbell Cup for Cleanliness to the high school, given each year to the House that accrued the most points for Yard Duty.
“You should’ve heard Gerty retching and swearing while she was cleaning the toilet,” Pat said when the topic came up years later. “She was shouting out filthy bastards and I had to tell her to keep quiet because old Angus was in his bedroom having his nap.”
An absentee grazier, Campbell owned a five-thousand acre sheep station in the Wimmera. He must have been impressed with Pat because he soon offered her the job of housekeeper at its homestead.
She accepted and was grateful. She couldn’t count on her brother’s generosity indefinitely and she had no other way of feeding her children. Arrangements were made to shift us and our few possessions north. It was the end of the school year, and despite my growing attachment to the Staggs I was glad to be leaving.
Shortly before the holidays a boy I didn’t know accosted me in the playground and pushed me in the shoulder.
“I know where your dad is,” he declared with a leer that startled me.
“So do I,” I lied quickly to hide my alarm.
But it sounded feeble.
Seeing I was afraid he laughed cruelly.
“So, you know he’s in jail, do yer?”
Stunned, I denied it, but without much conviction.
He insisted and added that his father was a policeman who knew these things. “My dad warned me not to have nothink to do with the likes of you. So keep out of my bloody way, Bung Eye.”
He pushed me aside and walked off.
I could hardly believe it despite my fears. My father in jail? That only happened to bad men. Criminals. Robbers. Murderers. Scary men…
Of course I knew nothing about his previous prison sentence for the Launceston siege. I knew nothing about his convic
tion for fraud. I tried to convince myself that Brisbane was too far away, even for a policeman, to know what had happened to him. I had tried my hardest, despite Aunt Gerty’s asides and my own doubts, to cling to Pat’s assurance that he had gone away for work. Now this boy’s accusation seriously undermined my fragile equanimity. Why would he make up something as terrible at that? The obvious answer was: he wouldn’t. Not only did I have no father in town, but he was emerging as someone who would make me blush violently whenever I was asked about him. I wondered what terrible thing he had done to deserve jail. I didn’t repeat the boy’s slander to anyone. Some things, I was learning, were better kept secret.
It was sweltering when we reached Kirkwall, the Wimmera sheep station, several hours north of Portland and eight miles from Apsley, a small rural service town, where Jean and I would be going to school. The sharp heat lifted my spirits despite the anxiety of another move into the unknown.
The parched paddocks shimmered, relinquishing what residual moisture there was in the ground. Sheep dawdled towards the meagre shade of dying trees or stood listlessly with their necks drooping and mouths agape in a silent pant. The sky was a pitiless blue. The track we travelled on consisted of brown powder that created a mock cloud behind the ute that Campbell had lent Pat for the trip.
We passed a fibro-cement sheet house where the station manager and his wife lived. Pat, with moist hands and droplets of perspiration on her forehead, drove further, on a grand sweep to the Kirkwall homestead, a sprawling brick mansion, rendered a faint pink colour, whose servants quarters we were to occupy. It was fully furnished but uninhabited.
“Well,” she said, holding our hands and giving us reassuring squeezes, as we walked, astonished, through the rooms. “We’ve come up in the world, haven’t we?”
My mother’s job was to keep the place spotless for the periodic arrival of Campbell. On average he stayed a few days, and while he graced us with his presence Pat’s duties included the preparation of his meals, to be served in a dining room big enough to be Apsley’s public hall, on the kind of table I had only seen in book illustrations of medieval castles. Mostly he came alone.
In the hot summer before the school year started I explored the vicinity of the homestead. Except for my sisters there were no other kids around. I spent much of the time alone, which didn’t bother me, being preferable to the company of others who might know something about my father.
The homestead was surrounded by gardens that a reclusive old farmhand maintained. A semi-circular driveway passed by a grand entrance. The eastern wing, where the bedrooms were located, overlooked a paved enclosure with a large fishpond. In the middle of the pond was an ornate fountain that operated whenever Campbell was in residence. Behind the homestead stood some spreading nut trees that cockatoos enjoyed feeding on.
Nearby was a shed that housed a generator and a bank of batteries, the source of electricity for the homestead. There was also a small dairy where Daisy the cow was milked. It had a special motorised vat that separated cream from milk. Up until then in my short life I had taken most endeavour and invention for granted, but these sheds opened my eyes to human ingenuity, gave me an inkling of the sort of creature I was. The smells, too, were intoxicating, the acrid fumes of diesel and acid, the sour fetor of the dairy, the smell of human cleverness. It made me anxious about growing up. About how much there was to learn.
Yet all this was nothing compared to the magical way my mother transformed cream to butter simply by adding salt and beating it for long enough, first with spoons or a hand-held beater and then with small wooden paddles, after draining off the excess liquid, the buttermilk, until it looked and tasted the same as what could be bought at the grocers.
I loved to watch her at work in the kitchen, whether it was making butter or cakes or scones, or roasting lamb, or doing dishes, or sweeping the floor. She wore a clean, ironed apron, and often hummed or sang to herself, unaware that I was watching her, a faraway expression on her face. She liked to listen to music from a bulky Bakelite radio on the bench near the meat safe, which played songs by Frank Ifield, Pat Boone and Doris Day. One of her favourites was a young man called Elvis Presley, but only when he sang his ballads, not that rock-n-roll, up-tempo nonsense. I soon had the impression that the kitchen with its cooking smells and music was her favourite place.
The smells always made me hungry, and if it wasn’t meal time, I would fill up on bread and honey or the scones she baked, which I ate with jam and Daisy’s cream and an earnestness fit for a rural show judge. “You must have hollow legs,” she’d say and we would laugh together.
My mother had grown up on a small farm in Gippsland, not far from La Trobe River. Living once more on a farm probably reminded her of the idyllic childhood she’d had. She often reminisced about her four older brothers who had treated her and their younger sister, Barbara, like mascots, taking them to their football matches, teaching them how to milk the family cow, taking them camping along the Ninety Mile Beach for Christmas holidays. Sea and sand. Brothers fishing in the waves. Garrulous gulls overhead. Making sandcastles with buckets and spades. Carefree times that she returned to in her mind as the years went by.
At home with her mother she had learnt the domestic skills that she would practise with pride throughout her life. But when her mother died suddenly, Pat’s life had veered off on an unexpected trajectory. Her father never had enough land to run a profitable farm. He earned extra money as a nightsoil man around the district. Yet somehow he took on a housekeeper to manage his large family and (according to some of my relatives) to be his mistress, just as the nation became embroiled in the Second World War. Two of his sons were conscripted, the eldest, Mick, was exempted on account of his Morse Code skills at the General Post Office, the other because he had a milk run, while the sisters were assigned to a clothes factory in the nearby township of Sale. The two girls spent the war years sewing military uniforms and dreamed of leaving home. They never warmed to the housekeeper-mistress and her daughter, who treated them like vassals.
Pat often told me the story of how she had moved to Tasmania with Barbara shortly after the war ended to escape the petty tyrannies of these ‘intruders’. It was her luck to meet Denny in Launceston. And my luck too, I guess.
Kirkwall had the feel of a sanctuary. I’d wake up in my own narrow bedroom to the enchanting warbles of magpies, so different to the raucous cockatoos and corellas that arrived later in the day. In the keen morning air, I’d visit the unexplored parts of the garden or the parched home paddock, with a long-retired greyhound and an orphaned lamb as my only companions. Solitude required so much less effort than company. I didn’t mind occupying my time with simple pursuits, like checking the progress of flowers, or counting pond fish, or studying cobwebs woven between trees, or following the trails of ants. I would feel the temperature rise by degrees with the regularity of a clock ticking over. I took pleasure in the day’s warmth on my neck.
The only outsider to visit that I can remember was the Rawleigh’s man, whose vehicle was a kind of mobile dispensary. He sold balms and medicines for minor ailments that needed no doctor’s prescription. Pat looked forward to his visits but I only had a passing interest in him. I secretly endowed him with evil intent; his lotions were clever poisons. Did he supply her with the Bex she took every day? I reconnoitred from behind a shrub, armed to the teeth, ready to defend our castle if he made one false move. I only appeared when the dust from his retreating van settled and silence returned.
Sometimes curiosity led me further away from the homestead towards low-lying land that was encircled by old, spreading eucalypts. As I approached an unpleasant hum seemed to emanate from the leaves. There was an eeriness about the place which intimidated me, and daring myself to walk to its centre, my courage failed. Still I went time and again to the periphery to experience the strange sensation.
“It’s the dead Aborigines, I bet,” Jean said, after I asked her to accompany me once.
Back at the home
stead she showed me her evidence, a skull that the gardener had recently given her, explaining that the homestead was built on a “blackfellas’ graveyard”.
There was another place I discovered that was just as unsettling, on a neglected piece of land beyond the vegetable garden and the chookyard. A large cage had been constructed of wire netting with a funnel entrance on top. Rotting meat was placed on the dirt floor of the cage, and crows would arrive to drop through the funnel for an easy meal. Their woes began on departure. When they flew up to the funnel their wingspan was too wide to allow their escape. Every few days the old farmhand would check his catch and shoot any bird not yet dead from exhaustion or thirst. “They pick out the little lambs’ eyes,” Pat said to mollify me as much as explain the trap’s purpose. It crossed my mind that this was another manifestation of human ingenuity, and it disturbed me.
Pat did her best to fortify her brood against the starker realities of our predicament. I was still too young to understand the burden she faced bringing us up alone, the loneliness she must have felt. She was in her early thirties, a woman in the prime of her life, whose husband at the very least must have been a disappointment. But if she had regrets or resentments she never revealed them to us. Looking back there seems to be moments when I was concerned about her emotional state. But how can I be certain these are genuine childhood responses rather than something I later hoped I had once felt, when I was old enough to appreciate what she had endured? Besides, if I had such moments they were fleeting and private, shared with nobody, neither sisters nor mother.
You Never Met My Father Page 5