Mum would point out which bird she’d earmarked for the table that day, and usually their heads were knocked off first thing in the morning. It was a messy job and we had a chopping block in the backyard on which to do it. The block was also used to chop fuel for the fire, as we had a wood stove as well as a wood copper, and both were needed for the preparation of table birds.
When Mum was able to secure a man to behead the bird, she’d wiggle her eyebrows at me and tell me to, ‘Sharpen the axe.’ This was her sign that someone else was coming to do it, because the axe was too big, heavy and awkward for me to wield comfortably while holding the bird still on the block. When I was to do the job, she’d just ask me if my tomahawk was sharp. As the owner of the good file, though, I’d sit on the back stairs and carefully stroke to amazing sharpness the blade of the axe which was to be used to dispatch the bird as quickly and painlessly as possible. Horror stories abounded about beheading jobs that had been botched by blunt axes—chickens tearing around with their necks only half severed, others requiring three or four hacks with the axe to complete what should have been accomplished in one second. I prided myself that none of these sorts of things ever happened under my jurisdiction.
I learned to appreciate a fine axe, and to press my thumb on the side of a blade to test it for sharpness, ‘Just because it’s shiny doesn’t mean it’s sharp,’ I was admonished.
When head was finally separated from bird, and the creature had stopped fluttering around with the jerky movements of its dying nervous system, it was hung from the line upside down for the blood to drain out. Once the bird was dead and still, Mum would reappear from wherever it was she’d hidden while the nasty bits were going on, and she’d take over.
After breakfast, it was time to light the copper and boil the water. The bird was plunged into scalding water, softening its feathers so they could be more easily plucked. Neighbourhood and family pets had to be kept at bay during this procedure, as there were also stories which did the rounds about how dogs and cats had taken off with the Sunday roast before it had even made it to the oven, leaving the family hungry.
When the bird’s skin was completely clean and free from feathers, a stroke with Mum’s specially sharpened knife around the nethers would open it up to be gutted. We sometimes killed ‘old boilers’ she’d pointed out for slaughter, but she would carry on loudly and accuse us of having made mistakes if the ‘old boiler’, when cut open, was actually carrying eggs.
A task Mum tried unsuccessfully to get me to do was to trim some of the hens’ combs. We had Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds, ducks and a few bantams. Some of the Orpington hens’ combs grew so long that they drooped over one side of the poor chooks’ faces, causing them to be blind on that side. I was sorry for them as their gait became awkward and they missed out on food they couldn’t see. Mum sent me into the chook run with a pair of scissors and a sharp kitchen knife. When I inspected one bird closely I thought the comb, because of its red colour, was actually a blood centre and that, if cut, blood would squirt out all over me and the poor bird would probably die in my lap. I thought I’d do it if I could devise some way to cauterise the comb by using redhot wire to make the cut, but I was unable to work the bugs out of the plan, such as how to get wire which didn’t break or melt when it was heated, and how to heat the wire and hold the chook still at the same time. I sat up on the rocks holding the old hen on my knees for so long that Dellie came up to join me. We agreed this was not a desirable job at all, and it didn’t get done.
It was a great relief to me when Laaka stopped working on ships, got a job at the meatworks, and settled in permanently next door. He brought us two baby lambs which he’d saved at the abattoir, and we fed them from babies’ bottles we bought for the purpose. His English improved and he laid out a big vegetable patch in front of both the houses. He even grew some tobacco and came in to dry it in our oven. He often came for dinner, and once I asked Mum why she didn’t marry him so he could be our father. She said they didn’t care about each other ‘that way’, that they were just friends.
Other Finnish seamen jumped ship and were taken in by old Mrs Sullivan. They got jobs at the meatworks too, and Mum arranged for me, now aged about ten, to give them lessons in English in return for pocket money. That was fun and I learned a smattering of Finnish. Mum said the government considered people from Finland to be desirable, hard working and good prospects for migrants, but the men couldn’t get papers in Finland, so they hopped off the ship and hid in the country for a while before presenting themselves to the authorities. Then they got a fine and were allowed to stay because their ship had left and there was no way for them to return to Finland. Mum said I wasn’t to talk about it at school.
With Laaka next door to look after our house, Mum took the opportunity to pay a return visit to her sister, our Aunty Glad. The four of us, Mum and us three girls, went to Brisbane by train. The trip took two nights and one day, and at Rockhampton Mum left the carriage to go up the street to buy fish and chips at a shop close to the station. I was to mind the littlies. When the passengers alighted the driver shunted the train up the line to take on water and coal, but I thought we were leaving without Mum. Panic stricken, I ran up and down the carriages, dragging my sisters by their arms, screaming and telling the guards they had to wait for her. Mum was very amused when the train pulled back into the station to pick up the passengers who’d alighted to buy food at the canteen and the guard told her what had happened. I wasn’t, though, and felt that the whole trip would turn into a nightmare if Mum didn’t give me more help by telling me what was going on.
We kids hadn’t been thrilled by the idea of staying with Aunty Glad because she was so strict, but in her own house she was quite a different person, doing her best to prepare food with which we were familiar. At various times we’d met one or other of her children, but this was the first time we met them all together. Gerald and Patty were both older than me, Sandra about my own age, and Colleen was the youngest. Aunty Glad lived on a pension and rented out rooms in her South Brisbane house. She and Mum spent a lot of time catching up on the gossip about what was happening in the lives of other family members who, I learned, shunned Mum because her children were dark.
Aunty Glad and Mum took chairs into the backyard to talk so that we couldn’t overhear their conversations, but sometimes they’d finish their chats while they were preparing meals, and I tuned in as often as I could. Aunty Glad chided Mum for not letting her kids ‘mix with their own kind’, and said she’d have the devil to pay later. I wondered who my own kind were, if they were not these cousins, her children, whom we were now growing to know.
One day Mum took us to meet another family, and there were many of them lined up at the door to welcome us. The adults spent the day upstairs talking and we were sent under the house to play with our cousin, Hiram. The house was close by the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds and the show was on, and show-goers could park their cars in the yard for a fee. This income was an important supplement to the family’s funds.
Hiram’s father was Jackie Ryan, champion Aboriginal boxer, and our mothers had been friends since they were young. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard much about them before, but when we returned home, Mum showed me a snap of them together holding their small babies, who were myself and Hiram, up on a fence at the seaside. His mother had long, lustrous, wavy black hair and was very beautiful indeed.
Back in Townsville, Mum continued her work at the Mater Hospital laundry but also began doing occasional house-cleaning. This was strange because at home she did very little housework as she disliked domestic chores, other than cooking so we could all eat and washing, which she did for the money. Dellie and I, and even Leonie, all had to learn to use a broom and duster early. Mum had a long coir mat which ran the length of the hallway and we’d often be put to pick the dust and fluff off it with our fingers, a painful task. We didn’t have luxuries like a vacuum cleaner, but then neither did we have carpets. Our floors were covered with c
ongoleum over newspaper, and recovered when it became worn, until the congo covering was at least three or four layers thick.
Mum began keeping me home from school to accompany her on her house-cleaning missions. It was hard work on our hands and knees scrubbing floors and bathrooms, but Mum had given me a bike to ride conditionally and going cleaning was considered an appropriate occasion.
Unfortunately, around the same time Sister de Salles offered me the opportunity to be one of the Friday lunch girls. Students who wanted fish and chips on Fridays—and, being a Catholic school, that was just about everyone in the higher classes who could be entrusted not to lose their money—put their orders and cash in during the morning. At little lunch, two girls were dispatched to the fish shop to place the order, and we were given the nod by our teachers to leave class fifteen minutes before the regular lunchtime to pick up the lunches. The reward was the freedom, missing fifteen minutes of class, and lunch girls were each given a package of fish and chips for free from the store. Only girls with bikes were allowed to be lunch girls.
Friday was also the day most favoured by Mum for her house-cleaning. Mr Smith, a travelling salesman whose shirts Mum washed, was a bachelor who lived in a flat on the Strand and he often wanted it cleaned for when he came home on the weekends.
Sister de Salles didn’t like the idea of me missing school to go cleaning houses, but Mum said, ‘Sister de Salles doesn’t pay the bills in this house, I do!’ Although they were polite to one another, they both put pressure on each other through me. I was plagued by attacks of asthma and, curiously, they often occurred on Thursday nights, which I’d spend inhaling the fumes of crystals which were burnt on a little metal plate over a tiny lamp. Friday I’d get up and go house-cleaning or, if I was allowed, go to school and be lunch girl.
Sister de Salles made an impact on Mum, but the result was that Mum tried to coach me at home. Mum was an avid reader, a perfect speller, and knew all the times tables, but beyond that she could not be very helpful. She didn’t know history or geography very well, apart from things she’d heard or learned about, such as World War II combat arenas. She didn’t have the foggiest idea about algebra, and she was an opinionated woman who disputed almost everything we had to learn for social studies.
During my earliest years at school, our classrooms had been, to a significant extent, places of propaganda. We were often told simplistic things, such as ‘Communism is a big black bear and it will come down from the north and get us if we’re not careful.’ As I knew we already lived in the north, in my mind the bear wouldn’t have had far to go if it had wanted to get us. I often thought it might be lurking in the hills, getting ready to pounce. One day I’d shared this knowledge with Mum, and she hit the roof!
As well as setting me straight about how communism was just an idea, not a living animal, she told me the Catholics were too inclined to use threats of all kinds, including notions of hell and damnation, to get people to do what they wanted. I heard her tell Aunty Glad, during her next trip through Townsville, that the nuns were scaring kids with talk of big black bears and how angry she was about it.
So Mum’s views of the world, and consequently of things we were taught in social studies, were somewhat at odds with the answers I was required to give in order to get high grades. I saw a coupon in a magazine offering, for a penny down, a set of books which would cover all the things I needed to know for school, so I sent it in with a penny.
Not long after, a salesman from Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia Publishing Company turned up on our doorstep and told Mum I’d put the deposit down. Mum nearly choked. After she’d cooled down a bit, the man successfully worked out with her how I could have the books I wanted. He and his family only lived a short distance away on Melton Hill, and Mum began doing their laundry and housework until the encyclopedia was paid for. Even then he continued to offer her work. Naturally, I had to help.
St Joseph’s provided me with sound basic literacy and numeracy skills, and having an encyclopedia in the house enabled me to pursue almost any subject I wanted. I felt the information was more neutral than offered either by the nuns or by Mum, and I loved the look and feel of the beautiful books as well as the bounty within them.
Mum began to worry about the amount of time I spent reading. She was a member of the local library and had been in the habit of letting me take out books on her card because I’d read all the children’s books in which I had an interest and was beginning to work my way into some of the simple adult books. On top of this, I was also an avid comic reader with a fancy for the Phantom and other adventure stories, and I was active in a group of kids who were into swapping comics and cards from Stamina clothes.
Mum didn’t like boys from school coming around to swap comics and tried to get us interested in other things. She made us join a children’s theatrical group, but Dellie and I ended up standing around on the back of the stage in grass skirts as ‘atmosphere’ in plays in which white children got all the speaking roles, so that didn’t last long.
Mum had paid off the house with money from her job and the extra she made from her work on the side. I was easily staying in the top three places in all exams at the school, and Sister de Salles told Mum I had the brains to do anything I wanted. I’d been sick so much that the most contact I’d had with anyone outside the family, apart from the nuns, was with doctors, and somehow in my mind the idea grew that it would be a wonderful thing to be a doctor and be able to help people when they were sick. It didn’t occur to me that I’d never seen a Black doctor!
Mum began putting three pence a week into a special savings account, which she said was to go towards my costs when I went to university to do medicine. This was really a dream because there was no university in North Queensland. Still, whatever we decide to do as children is always abstract and nothing seems beyond the realm of possibility if you’re determined.
Dellie was very athletic so Mum put her into Little Athletics. The club met a long way from where we lived and she wasn’t allowed to go alone, of course, so that meant trying to interest me in athletics too. A couple of times a week, Dellie and I, and sometimes Leonie, caught a bus to Hermit Park for training. Dellie won consistently, but she didn’t like training, and she’d often spend her bus fare on lollies so we couldn’t go. At meets, she won all the cups for her age races and older, and they gave me a cup, ‘Most Consistent Trier’, for coming last in everything! I had weak ankles which kept getting wrenched out, but I thought if I tried hard enough I’d get over it and Mum would be pleased with me.
On one occasion, the Athletics Club organised a weekend meet with a club in Cairns, and Dellie was chosen to represent Townsville in her age group. Athletes were to be billeted and Dellie couldn’t go alone so the club agreed to take me. The night before we left, Mum drew me aside and gave me a piece of paper with an address written on it. The address was meaningless to me, I’d never been to Cairns and there was no name on the paper. She said, ‘If you or your sister want a drink of water or even if either of you is on fire, do not go into this house. You hear me?’
Her tone was frightening and not conducive to me asking any questions. Once more it was being demanded of me that I act on Mum’s secrets without knowing what they were. Mum also gave me a plastic sheet and cotton sheeting to put on Dellie’s bed so our hosts would not be inconvenienced.
We were placed with a very nice couple, both white of course, and I was terribly surprised to learn on our last day there that the man was a policeman. I’d have been surprised to have learned he was a banker, or anything, because I’d not really met or stayed at anyone’s house like that. But a policeman?
Naturally, from the minute we arrived, I had my eye out for the street of my mother’s note, which was burning a hole in my pocket. My curiosity in those days was enormous. As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait because it was a main street. I couldn’t believe my good fortune because it was the very street we drove along the next day in order to get to t
he sportsground. On the way back to our billet, I kept a very sharp eye out for the house number, but I was looking on the wrong side and missed it. I had one last chance as we were leaving the following day.
Next morning I counted the numbers down as we were driven along the street and the house came and went in my line of vision. It was highset, sitting in its own fairly large block of land, and in the corner of the block was a shop. I noticed from the sign that it was a hairdressers’ shop, but that was all I could see. I wasn’t in any position to ask our hosts to double around so I could look at it again.
I immediately and intensely hated whoever it was who lived there. What sort of people were they who wouldn’t give two small girls a drink, or even water if they were on fire? The idea was like a thorn in my mind, and it would fester on for decades before the mystery would be solved, and even then, not completely.
5
With first the house and later the encyclopedias paid off, Mum looked around for another large purchase to make. She’d grown used to paying something off and liked the idea. So she went to Palings and bought a piano. The Taylor family, who lived in a very big, fancy house on the corner of our track and Hale Street, had a piano, and we’d often hear the daughter of the house, Pauline, practising of an afternoon. Mum couldn’t play an instrument, so her choice surprised me, and she said she was going to send me to lessons. Like most children, I enjoyed singing and dancing and my sisters and I gave little concerts for Mum, Nellie or Maisie from time to time, but I hadn’t thought of myself as particularly talented musically.
Snake Cradle Page 7