Many of the town’s daughters complied with their mothers’ wishes by getting up the duff while still at school or shortly after leaving at the age of fourteen. A shotgun marriage was fairly hastily arranged, so that Yankalillee was famous for the number of premature births among its population. In the eyes of the town the problem had been rectified and respectability restored. After all, life goes on.
This rather hasty nuptial binding, between a girl only barely past the giggling stage and a boy whose major interest in life was tuning his Holden or Ford or Austin and getting pissed of a Saturday night and then going for a burn with his mates, was almost inevitably the beginning of a disaster. Unless his folk had a few quid or were on the land, he had few if any prospects and was totally unprepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. Increasingly he escaped to the pub to drown his sorrows. This invariably meant he would return home and take his frustration out on his teenage missus who was nursing the baby that had ruined both of their lives by arriving about five years too early.
Marriage was everything, because respectability was the only thing that counted. Much better having a drunk who beat you than being an old maid, which was considered a fate worse than death except for one other thing, the ultimate disgrace Sarah now faced. If she kept the baby she would be an unmarried mother. For this last sin there was no forgiveness. You were a slut when you did it and you remained one for the remainder of your life.
The correct procedure towards marriage for a young woman in Yankalillee went like this. You worked as a typist in the front office of the soft-drink factory or as a waitress in the Parthenon cafe, a hairdresser in Kells Beaute Parlour or learned the florist trade with Florence’s Fabulous Flowers or worked as a secretary for the Forestry Commission. During this period you assembled your glory box. In your early twenties, if not before, you became engaged, had a party, which consisted mainly of oohs and aahs and exclamations at the largeness of your very small diamond ring by all your girlfriends. This was followed by your kitchen tea, whereupon you resigned your job and got a set of double-bed sheets or a nice tablecloth from the management and staff, and finally the marriage took place, the full extravaganza in vestal gown and veil to the pealing of church bells and your picture in the local rag.
From this moment on, your husband was the breadwinner and you were his wife, more an animated and useful possession than an equal partner. If he turned out to be a poor provider with an unquenchable thirst and a tendency towards violence, well, that was sad, but not a reason for splitting up. You were no better or worse off than most. Your husband wasn’t a bad bloke really, he got drunk on a Friday and again on the Saturday night after which he demanded a legover without precautions. If you were Catholic or unlucky with the diaphragm, or stupid, the kids just kept on coming until brewer’s droop finally killed your husband’s potency and snoring took over from grunt, push and burp. In the meantime you’d put on weight, lost your looks and were trapped with nowhere to go. What you endured was the female role found in many a typical bushtown marriage.
Mr Baloney and Grandmother Charlotte were the classic pattern in unequal partnership set long before their own misbegotten marriage and this was a tragedy to be repeated in the bush unto the next generation and the one after. Had it not been for the advent of television in 1956 and the new perceptions it brought into Australia, this state of male/female disparity and constant disharmony in marriage might well have continued until today. In some places it’s still like that, though I’m sure Australia isn’t alone in this.
However, Australia was a backwater at that time and the small towns within it were stagnant pools of disaffection between husband and wife. I suppose there must have been lots of good marriages and happy couples but it would be wrong to say that females had a fair go in the bush.
Nancy, for instance, had never considered divorcing Tommy, not only because she was a Catholic but also because she was a country girl. Her reputation was permanently sullied from having had four children out of wedlock but the one thing that redeemed her slightly in the eyes of Yankalillee was that she’d eventually married a local boy who had fought in the war and, despite his unfortunate ability with a glass-cutter and a pinch bar, she had kept her marriage to him intact.
It was not only the migrant women but also their men who changed the established work patterns in our small town. The reffos, who mostly couldn’t speak English, put in a hard day’s yakka and seldom complained, even when they got ripped off and were paid too little for their nonunionised skills.
The difference between them and us was this. Most of our blokes spent all their spare time in the pub and quite a lot of what shouldn’t have been spare time there as well. A beer at lunchtime would often enough spill over into the afternoon and then on to six o’clock closing.
Blokes would get a few beers under their belts and in this temporary state of euphoria they’d volunteer to be in anything going that was good for the community. Go out and burn firebreaks. Volunteer to work a weekend on the extension to the bush-nursing hospital. Re-timber the seats on the football stand. Repair the stone fence running alongside the Anglican church. Or simply man a sausage sizzle at the local fete. If such a request was made on any given afternoon in any of the town’s seven pubs, the response would be immediate, ‘Name the time and the date, mate, we’ll be there, no worries.’ You’d be all set, thinking you’d got it set up, only you’d forgotten you were talking to a bunch of drunks who’d wake up the next day and would either not remember what they’d promised or decide that the commitment was just too bloody hard, so when the big day came around, nobody would turn up.
Almost nothing you could call civic duty really got going in Yankalillee. If it required a donation of time and effort from your average male citizen, it wouldn’t happen. In fact, the two characteristics you could absolutely rely on from them was an insatiable thirst and the fecklessness that comes from a perpetual hangover.
Women did all the charity work in town, this usually involved church bazaars, fetes, street stalls, debutante balls, school socials, B & S dances and the like. If it wasn’t something that required baking cakes and scones, selling raffle tickets, bottling preserves, doing a bit of jam-making or needlework, it just didn’t happen.
The only events men seemed to organise were the Anzac Day March, the ‘Men’s Day’ at the golf club and the footy finals. This required a minimum of fuss. Every male golfer attended as a matter of course and with the footy final, every man in town considered his attendance compulsory, especially if his team was going to win.
Anzac Day, for instance, mainly involved turning up with your medals pinned more or less in a straight line on your left breast. George Fisch, who probably fought for the other side, knew to assemble the town brass band at the top of King Street and to make sure Bluey Porter, the chemist, and a regimental bugler during the war, didn’t get too pissed the night before so that he could render the last post, generally these days off-key.
Red Turnbull, the Anglican minister, who flew with the RAF in the Battle of Britain, knew his part off by heart and so did Father Crosby, who did the benediction at the end of the two minutes’ silence.
The remaining effort required from the generally outof-step males marching was to fall out at the rotunda and disperse to any one of the town’s seven pubs to play two-up and lose more than they could afford and, in the process, get thoroughly pissed meanwhile bullshitting their mates about their deeds in the army, telling waries, how they personally won the war. As the sun set over those Anzacs who were still alive, their wives arrived and picked them up off the pub floor or the footpath and drove them home legless to snore all night on the couch in the living room with their medals still bravely pinned to their chests.
On the other hand, the migrants worked all hours of the day and night, gobbling up any overtime available as a result of the lassitude of the general population. Although they were not great civil-duty volunteers themselve
s, this was mostly because nobody thought to ask them. The Catholics, or more specifically Father Crosby, could always rely on the Italians to do a bit of concreting or brickwork to the glory of God and Il Papa in Rome. If you didn’t watch the Italians carefully, they’d throw a bit of red or green concrete dye into the cement just where you didn’t want it. Later, when they had their own houses, they’d cement the front yard with green concrete, better than mowing the lawn or having bindies in the grass I suppose. The Balts and the Maltese would manage a bit of voluntary carpentry for the church as well.
The town wouldn’t think to ask a migrant for voluntary help, on the basis that they weren’t one of us. This inferred a state of acceptance that couldn’t be bought and could only be earned after completing a couple of generations in the town or immediate district. We Maloneys may have been at the bottom of the heap but our rights as citizens of Yankalillee were solid as a drilled and bolted rock face.
Although most migrants applied for and were granted Australian citizenship at a naturalisation ceremony after their five-year migrant status had expired, this in no way helped at the local level. In the eyes of the locals they remained strangers and foreigners for as long as they lived.
George Fisch, a German migrant who took over as volunteer bandmaster when old Willie Perkins attempted a high note on the trumpet during a rendition by the band of ‘Colonel Bogey’ and suffered a heart attack, was only elected to the position because there wasn’t anyone else with a local background who could do the job. Before the war he had studied at the Conservatory of Music in Vienna and George was Yankalillee’s best-trained musician by a country mile. Furthermore, the brass band was a tradition unbroken since it was formed by melodiously inclined miners during the gold rushes for the purpose of Sunday-afternoon entertainment and for drumming up membership to the miners’ union. After a great deal of discussion by the shire councillors, it was reluctantly agreed that George should take charge of the band.
During his twenty years as bandmaster, Yankalillee’s brass band, hitherto unknown and unsung, became nationally respected and was a source of constant pride to the town and district. Yet, in all that time, George Fisch was never invited into the home of a single important citizen. To the very end he remained an outsider and when the band won the National Brass Band Championships in Melbourne in 1968, it was Harry Yerberry, the shire president at the time, not George Fisch, who stepped up to the rostrum to claim the coveted award. George paid his own share of the train fare that took the band to Melbourne and sat in the audience with the band members to watch the awards ceremony and listen to Harry Yerberry’s ‘From Gold Rush to Gold Medal’ thank-you speech in which his name wasn’t once mentioned.
The Bonegilla Migrant Camp was about half an hour down the road and Sundays we’d go and have a squiz at these strange creatures we were allowing to share in the future of our glorious nation. To us locals they were the Sunday-afternoon sideshow. You know, like you’d go and look at the site of a motor-car accident where somebody had got killed or at a house that had burnt down with two young children asleep upstairs, or some other such vicarious happening.
Here’s how it happened in our family. Bozo would work on the Diamond T Sunday mornings, getting the old girl ready for the week ahead, cleaning the points, flushing out the carburettor, filling the battery, checking the radiator and the hose and doing anything else that needed doing, which was usually something fairly nasty. Then, after dinner when he’d finished, we’d all go for a Sunday-arvo drive. If Tommy wasn’t on a bender he’d drive us and let Nancy stay home to read a book. She always liked to read a book she’d taken out of the library of a Sunday afternoon. ‘I never had any education but books,’ she’d say. That’s why sometimes she had these big words to use on us even if she didn’t always talk proper like Sarah. Even when she drove, she’d take a book and we’d stop somewhere for an hour or so and she’d read while we mucked about or went for a walk in the bush.
Sarah would come along, though mostly to give little Colleen an outing. She would sit with Tommy in the front, or if Nancy drove she’d be in the back with Bozo and me and little Colleen, who loved to feel the wind in her face. Mike almost never came. A couple of miles or even further from Bonegilla you’d come across the first lot of reffos, people from the camp going for a Sunday walk. They didn’t have cars or any way of getting away except on foot so they’d walk along the road. They’d often wear their national costumes and whole families or groups would be walking, holding hands, sometimes even singing folk songs with one of them playing a squeeze box or piano accordion. Sometimes you’d come across the reffos having a picnic under a clump of gum trees and they’d have weird things to eat. ‘Garlic Munchers’ we’d call them. They’d eat things you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Pickled cucumbers and dried-up tomatoes, pickled cabbage, and soup they’d made out of beetroot. Can you imagine something as terrible as beetroot soup! They’d have these big sausages that stank to high heaven, but you could almost understand those because they were a bit like a saveloy, only bigger and much stinkier. There was also pigs’ feet, stuff we wouldn’t eat even on an offal week.
They had this bread that wasn’t white like proper bread, but dark-brown, like a chocolate colour. I’m not kidding. It looked stale and we thought the poor buggers had to eat it because they couldn’t afford not to. But it wasn’t, it was baked like that, the colour of dark chocolate. We once tried a slice that was given to us, it had pickled cucumber on it in thin slices, which looked like your proper cucumber only smaller and lighter green so you could nearly see through it and it rested on this soft white stuff Sarah said was some sort of cheese, although it didn’t look like cheese and it didn’t taste like any cheese I’ve ever et. I must have made a face because the husband and wife who gave it to us laughed. I wanted to spit it out but couldn’t, because, even though they were reffos, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Anybody eating stuff like that must be very poor, and not very civilised, is all I can say. I reckon they got to Australia just in time.
The migrants had no money and had to hope they could get out of Bonegilla as soon as possible and get jobs in the town or the district. The big hope was to get a job on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. But the problem with that was that if they did they usually had to leave their families behind. Only the engineers and people like them, the big nobs, got houses in the Snowy and the rest of the workers lived in the men’s single quarters, dormitories or barracks.
The wages were good, much higher than in the towns, and they could save a bit and, Sarah said, make a fresh start in a new country. They claimed the Snowy Mountains Scheme was the biggest construction works going on in the world at that time and that Sir William Hudson, who was in charge of it, was an absolute genius who was showing the world how these things should be done. Also, they lost a man for every mile of tunnel they dug, which was very good considering how many people other nations lost doing the same thing.
If you were a little bloke you stood a better chance of dying. The reason was this. When they cemented the walls of the tunnels, they’d pour concrete through a hole in the top of these huge steel-cylinder moulds and when it was half full, some little guy had to climb in through the hole with a shovel and see that there were no air pockets. If he found some, he had to tamp the cement down. Sometimes the concrete would collapse and he’d be buried in it and when that happened there was no way of getting him out. So when you go through one of those tunnels, there’s skeletons from just about every nation in the world buried in the walls somewhere. But, you’ll be glad to know, less than if someone else except Sir William Hudson had been in charge. ‘Bill Hudson is the best large-project manager in the world,’ people would say and we’d all be proud.
Once we saw this documentary at the flicks and it showed how Mussolini, the Eyetalian dictator, built these tunnels through the Eyetalian Alps and they said it was a masterpiece of engineering. ‘Ha!’ I thought, ‘I’ll bet th
ere’s hundreds of dead workers’ skeletons concreted over, mile after mile of bones of little Eyetalians buried in the cement.’ I mean, they wouldn’t tell you the truth, would they?
It was lots of fun seeing the migrants jabbering away in their lingo or singing in funny languages, all dressed up in their Sunday best and sweating like pigs. They’d be carrying a small stem of gum leaf to whisk the flies off them and you’d see family groups who would stand for hours looking at a paddock of sheep or cattle. Bozo and me used to laugh at them and feel very superior until Sarah said we shouldn’t, and it wasn’t their fault that they weren’t born in Australia, where cows and sheep weren’t a curiosity.
The reffos seemed to like the Diamond T and crowded around it when we stopped. Some of them explained that they remembered it when the Americans arrived to liberate them from Adolf Hitler and they’d come in these big old Diamond Ts among their army trucks. So we were a sort of all-round good memory for them.
After a while Tommy started taking the kids for a ride down the road a bit, piling about fifty little kids in the back and off he’d go, so that we were soon very popular and everyone would practise their English on us. Sarah would teach them new words and help them with their pronunciation. They sometimes gave us food to eat and we’d say thank you and explain that we’d eat it later and then we’d throw it out the window on the way home.
Anyway, one Sunday we meet this couple. Well, we didn’t exactly meet them. The Diamond T has a flat tyre on account of we’re down to the canvas again. Tommy leaves us to fix it and goes for a walk in the bush. Bozo and me have removed the tyre and taken out the inner tube, pumped it up and are trying to find the puncture spot. The tube already has about fifty patches so that finding the leak is anyone’s guess. Usually you’d push the tube into a tub of water to see where the bubbles rise from the air escaping from the puncture. Only there’s no water around to immerse the tube. Bozo’s running his hand over the tyre, hoping to feel the air escaping from the puncture spot, when this little bloke comes walking up. He stands there with his hands clasped behind his back, watching us and clucking ‘titch-titch’. Every once in a while he’d shake his head and soon he’s about as welcome around us as a bad smell. Eventually he says, ‘Excuse please, sir?’
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