Some of the information I was able to put to use immediately, such as the details about nutrition. I began to understand cause and effect, and the different ways various foods affect different people, and to take these things into consideration in regard to my own health. I eliminated eggs from my diet because they were rich with albumen, which was regarded, at the time, as perhaps creating a predisposition towards asthma. I made this change much to Mum’s annoyance since our hens were a plentiful source of eggs. I then cut out more foods and began experimenting with others. There wasn’t a lot of scope available because my meals were prepared without any consultation with me, but when I’d worked out what I would and wouldn’t eat and let it be known, if this food turned up on my plate I left it there.
I grew stronger although I was still very thin. One memorable day, two women, one a physiotherapist, came to help me to start walking again and to show Mum how I was to go about this. Mum had an old dropside cot which she had put in the backyard for her two cattle dogs, Bluey and Delta, to sleep in. The women carried me into the backyard, put the dropside up, and propped me up by my elbows on the cot. Mum ran out to take my photo with the box brownie she kept for special occasions. The day is so clear in my mind, and I remember how wonderful it was to stand there at last with my feet on the ground, the sun beating down on my face and a light breeze blowing across my skin. It had been a very long time since I’d been able to do this. I recall how absolutely terrific I felt, but the memory I carry bears no relationship whatsoever to the photograph taken that day, in which I look like a starving child from a famine-ridden country.
The physio weighed me, and I clocked in at three stone six pounds (just under 22 kilograms). Mum wept on my bed when they’d gone, telling me I had to eat more. The women came for a short visit every few days, teaching me exercises to strengthen my muscles. They were amazed by the flexibility which I’d always had, as I could cross my ankles up behind my head and twist my arms around each other in the centre of my back to touch my head, but they wanted me to increase my physical strength. So, I began walking down the hall by holding onto the walls, then walking around the yard holding onto the fence, and soon I was walking almost as well as before. Mum said I could go back to school in the next year, which was still some months away.
I’d missed almost a year’s schooling but I was determined that I would stay in my grade and sit the scholarship exam with the same girls who had always been in my class.
I’d already suffered enough embarrassments because Dellie was taller than me, and I didn’t want to be put down into her class, because I felt there would then have been virtually nothing to make me stand out as the eldest. I also feared that people would then think I was dumb. I asked Dellie to bring me a list of the books my class was studying but she was unable to get it for me, so Mum went to the bookstore in town that stocked our school’s requirements.
The nuns weren’t happy about my decision to remain with my class but said they would give me a chance to show them whether I could catch up. By this time, my class had moved from St Joseph’s Primary School to St Patrick’s College. We wore long-sleeved uniforms with starched white cuffs and collars, ties and thick black stockings, even on the hottest summer days.
While I had been ill, I’d discovered that I could close my eyes and recall whole pages of the books I’d read that day and on previous days. I could also replay in my head popular songs and even classical music which I’d heard on the radio. When I returned to school I surprised myself with the degree of retentiveness I was able to bring to my lessons. Within a few months I’d caught up with the girls in my class and was permitted to proceed into the next grade and sit for the scholarship exams.
At the beginning of the school holidays I suffered another great trauma. Mum took Dellie shopping and she came home with half a dozen brassieres. Two years younger than me and already Dellie was wearing bras and I wasn’t. Mum’s response when I confronted her with the injustice of it all was, ‘Well, you don’t need them yet.’ I didn’t think Dellie needed them to cover up her little split peas either, but Mum said she had a bigger build than me and that her development was more prominent. When I continued to seek reassurances that my illnesses were not going to mark me all my life, Mum said cruel things. ‘Wake up to yourself. You’ve got a figure like a snake, no hips and nothing at the top. In fact you go in where everybody else goes out! If I bought a bra for you we’d have to nail it on the right place with sticking plaster!’
I was wounded and no one seemed to understand my plight. At the age of thirteen, my classmates were turning into young women, hiding in the toilets and talking about their ‘monthlies’. They were wearing jewellery and, on special occasions, perfume and pink lipstick. Of course, they all wore brassieres and many of them flaunted matching lacy underwear and suspender belts. My lucky sister was poised to join this group and I was being left behind. I was so envious that, occasionally, I would crouch over and ask to be allowed to go home from school with cramps—just so my classmates would think that I, too, had reached menstruation and include me in their adult talk.
Since the physiotherapist’s visit when she weighed me, Mum had been promising we could all go on a trip during the Christmas holidays if I would just eat enough to get to four and a half stone. I didn’t exactly make it, but I was close enough for her to proceed with the plan. Dessie, by this time, had married a man named Reginald Mills. Reg was shorter than the willowy Dessie, of handsome appearance with jet-black hair and a small moustache. They’d taken a job running a property at Torrens Creek, which is along the Townsville—Mt Isa line. We went there by train, arrived at night and were met by Reg and Dessie to be taken in their truck another hundred or so miles to the property.
The minute I saw the place I loved it. The house was a big, old wooden two-storey structure, very open, with its own generator. There were a few horses, some cows for milk and a lot of sheep and kangaroos. The horses were ex-racehorses, and when Reg saddled them up he had to jump up on them and let them ‘run their distance’ before they’d settle down to being a station horse for the day. When the horses had tired from their fast run, Reg would put me on one of them and he and I would ride around to look at this and that. We had to check the windmill, which pumped up water, and various other things around the property that required monitoring and attention. He also let me trail along after him when he went to ride the boundary and check the fences. I think my last illness had caused Mum to become fatalistic about me, because she would look out warily at the horses and caution me about going on them, but she didn’t stop me. My sisters didn’t seem remotely interested in doing any of these things. We used to splash around in the old watertank, which was kept full of water for the horses to drink, when the heat became overpowering. But Dellie, in particular, was frightened to get into it. The water attracted bees, wasps and dragonflies, and my sisters were easily scared off by flying insects.
A creek which ran through the property had all but dried up, and only some waterholes were found along its course. These rapidly shrinking waterholes were packed with fish that were landlocked due to the drought. We would stand in the shallows and throw fish out onto the land with our hands, and we soon had as many as we could eat. If we stood still in the water, fish nipped us with their sharp little teeth.
There was a wind-up gramophone in the house, and I almost wore holes in the few records they had which I liked. We didn’t have a gramophone at home and I’d never heard these particular songs before, but I’d wander around happily singing, ‘She fought like a tiger for ’er honour, for ’er honour, for ’er honour’, This was my favourite, along with ‘These Foolish Things Remind Me of You’, although I didn’t have much of a clue what the words meant.
We stayed about ten days before Reg and Dessie drove us back into Torrens Creek to catch the train. The town consisted of one shop, which was more of a depot for picking up supplies sent up from the nearest major town, and one hotel. The train came through very late at night. To fill the time, the
adults sat in the hotel and had a few drinks. They were all aware that I was unhappy to be leaving, and when Mum got a bit tipsy Dessie put it to her that I should be allowed to stay another two weeks, until Dessie herself would be coming down to Townsville for a dental appointment. Unbelievably, Mum said okay.
I had to scramble around and get some of my clothes out of the suitcases. We just rolled them up into a swag and put them in the truck. I couldn’t trust my luck until I watched the train pull away, as I’d kept thinking Mum would come to her senses any moment and change her mind.
The next day I discovered that I hadn’t managed to grab any bloomers, which meant that I only had the pair I was wearing. I was too shy to confide in Dessie and, besides, her clothes were too large for me, so the two weeks were spent in an agony of juggling between that pair and my swimming togs without anyone discovering my predicament.
This embarrassment was outweighed by all the terrific things we fitted into the time. On New Year’s Eve, owners of the neighbouring station held a picture-show evening. We travelled the round trip of a hundred and twenty miles to their place to lay on the ground in their yard, watching a film flicker on a big bedsheet which they’d turned into a screen.
In the house, Dessie taught me to churn butter from the rich cream taken from the top of the milk, while in the yard Reg taught me to shoot and clean his rifle, and we went out on horseback looking for kangaroos. The first time we ran out of meat, Reg had me shoot a sheep from a flock wandering near the homestead. He threw it in the back of the truck to carry it a few hundred yards to a tree beside the house, where he winched it up to butcher it. Perhaps to put me off, he asked me if I’d slice it open. But he didn’t know me very well, because I took the finely sharpened knife and had a go but was unable to make a cut through its fleece. When he saw I wasn’t easily deterred, Reg showed me how to slit the carcass down the belly from neck to tail, identify the edible organs, and remove them before completely gutting it, then remove the sheepskin in one piece. Throughout the lesson, Dessie was yelling at him from inside the house where she was tending her small son, Neville, that he shouldn’t have me doing things like that because Mum would have a fit if she found out. I didn’t say anything about the kittens and chickens Mum had already made me kill because it seemed to me they had a different image of her than I did.
In the second week, Reg said he would have to ride out to a distant paddock to get another sheep, and he asked if I wanted to come for company. He told me not to wear the shorts I had on as we would probably have to walk in the bush. Mum had never allowed me to have long pants, because she said they weren’t ‘ladylike’. When I climbed into the truck Reg didn’t notice I was still wearing the shorts.
Some miles from the house, Reg spotted a flock of sheep running through the trees and he drove as close to them as he could. They were disturbed by the motor, and we couldn’t get near enough for a sure shot from the truck. He pulled up and began to sprint across the ground, with me in close pursuit. Bounding over a fallen tree trunk, I was just one step behind him when I felt a sting and looked down. A snake, seeming as startled as I felt, was staring back at me with a sad expression on its face. I didn’t break stride but yelled, ‘Reg, a snake’s bit me.’
Reg reeled around and came running back towards me. I thought he would want to look at the bite mark, but instead I saw his fist come wickedly towards me, and next thing I was out like a light.
When I woke, I was in bed back at the house, my leg bandaged just above the knee. Reg and Dessie were hovering in the next room and when they saw I was awake, Reg came and sat beside me. I asked him what had happened and he told me he’d called the Flying Doctor, who’d come in and taken a piece out of my leg, so I’d be alright now. He said this in such a sly way, however, that I found it hard to believe him. I thought perhaps he had sliced into my leg and sucked the poison out himself, as all North Queenslanders were taught to do at the time, but Dessie stood in the doorway behind him, nodding at his explanation, and over the next few days they both stuck to this story. They told me that I shouldn’t tell Mum because she’d be angry that she’d let me stay and might never let me come out to the station again. My leg was sore but nothing dramatic had happened to me, so I figured they were probably right and it was too trifling to bother Mum with. By the time Dessie and I were to return to Townsville I was walking as right as rain, and Mum didn’t ask me about the band-aid, which by that time was all that was required to cover the small wound.
We had bigger problems to worry about when we arrived back. Dessie had developed a gum disease and had to have all her teeth removed. Instead of using a general anaesthetic, as they would probably do now, the staff at the dental hospital decided to take a quarter of her teeth out each day for four days. Every day, Dessie came home crying and in great pain. We kids were all frightened witless and undertook to brush our own teeth with more vigour than we’d ever shown before.
Dellie and I went back to the YWCA briefly, but we’d outgrown the Saturday afternoon juniors club and were expected to attend on Friday nights instead. I wasn’t as happy there, and we no longer had Fay Naylor as our group leader, so I decided I wasn’t going anymore.
Throughout the later years of primary school, we’d had class swimming. As Tobruk Memorial Pool is conveniently located almost directly across the street from the Catholic school, we had easy access. Mr Lawrence was the pool manager and his daughter, Kay Lawrence was a close friend in my class. Her older brother, Laurie, has since gone on to become an internationally famous swimming coach. Their family lived in an apartment above the pool.
At that time the Australian Olympic Swimming Team came north to do their winter training at Tobruk Pool. The whole town buzzed with excitement pending their arrival. It was not unusual to see Dawn Fraser or Lorraine Crapp, Usa or Ion Konrads walking down the street, and many people went to the pool early in the morning just to gaze at them through the chain-wire fence, swimming their laps. Forbes Carlisle was also there, walking up and down and consulting his stop watch.
I’d already demonstrated a propensity for swimming by winning a few races at our school carnivals, particularly in backstroke. Indeed, the doctors at the hospital had been suspicious that I may have picked up the meningitis virus from the swimming pool. Mum and I, however, had arrived at the conclusion that, because meningitis has a ten-day incubation period and I’d had my first polio immunisation exactly ten days before coming down with the disease, the immunisation had something to do with it. Although the doctors were loath to agree, because they might have regarded this as a slight on their profession, they did recommend that I not continue the polio immunisation program.
I’d read in the encyclopedia about the beneficial effects of swimming on lung capacity, and felt that this might be another excellent way to get on top of my asthma. Mum agreed. So, when I was well enough, I went back into the water and began chewing up the laps with all the other wannabees.
I had what I called ‘inward looking feet’, and Mum had always been worried about my stance. She had taken me to several doctors when I was younger to see if I needed an operation for pigeon-toes. Once she brought home a second-hand pair of surgical boots that some doctor had given her. They had irons attached which came up to my knees and were supposed to force my feet to grow outwards. I refused to wear them outside the house and eventually Mum returned them, so that a ‘more grateful’ child could benefit from them, she said. She later enrolled me in a ballet class to see if the outwards-pointing classical dance pose would assist my feet to look to the front, but again to no avail. Then a doctor told her there was nothing wrong with the bones in my legs, that some children stand pigeon-toed as a means of expressing embarrassment: advice which she ignored. After that, she stopped seeking a medical cure for my psychological distress.
When I announced that I was taking up swimming seriously, Mum nodded and said, ‘With those big feet both pointing inwards, you won’t have to wear flippers and you’ll still swim fast. It might
turn out to be the best sport for you after all.’
On my bicycle it was only minutes from our house to the pool, although it took a little longer to get home as it was uphill a lot of the way. I began to rise at five-thirty and slip out of the house to be at the pool by six, where I’d put in an hour or so before returning home for breakfast.
What with my studies, swimming, and a short stint with a gymnastics group where we learned tumbling and the basics of judo, time flew by very quickly and, in the main, fairly uneventfully. An extraordinary thing happened around the middle of the year, however, which was soon to have repercussions for my future. I was walking in the main street one day, as usual looking down—a habit left over from my bower-bird days—when I spotted a roll of money with a rubber-band around it lying right in my path. I picked it up, and when I realised how much was in the wad, I became frightened and started to shake. As I was on my way home, and had to walk past the police station, I handed the money in to the police. The constable on the desk took my name and address, and I was glad to be rid of my find.
In the evening there came a knock on the door, and Mum went to see who it was. I heard a man’s voice, then Mum called me. A stranger in a white shirt and tie stood on the top step, and Mum asked curiously, ‘Roberta, did you find a roll of money today?’
When I admitted that I had, she said that this gentleman had lost it. He didn’t think he’d get it back but he had gone to the police station hopefully. Now he wanted to reward me for my honesty, and he handed Mum twenty pounds. Mum ran around and told the neighbours how I had found over five hundred pounds and was so honest I’d taken it to the police station and hadn’t even bothered to ask her. She told me to put the reward in my school bank account, where it more than doubled my meagre savings. Then I promptly forgot about the man.
At the end of the school year, girls began talking about what they planned to do during their holidays, with a few of us from the not well-to-do families deciding to put our names down for work at stores which hired additional staff over Christmas. I felt no one would hire me because there were no women of colour working in any store in Townsville at that time.
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