‘Ladies and gentlemen, salute your partner!’ We bowed, Mr Leaf to me, me to the old man.
‘Oh, I wish I were in the land of cotton, where old friends are not forgotten,’ sang the concertina-player.
‘Salute the opposite corner, return to your partner and swing!’ ordered Mr Leaf.
‘Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.’
‘Swing your partner.’ This was wonderful. There could be nothing better than this! Round and round we swung, kicking for momentum with one foot while the other pivoted round. Bill Leaf held me as he had when we waltzed with my arm doubled behind my back. All the others swung holding hands, their arms extended to full length. A girl in one of the other sets swung off the floor, her legs hung out behind her as her partner kept swinging her round and round by her hands.
‘She’s good,’ I marvelled to Bill Leaf as we went steadily round and round.
‘A good dancer never loses her feet,’ he said, and went on round and round, his clenched fist pushed into the small of my back supporting me as I lent on my doubled-back arm. I knew then that we were swinging faster than anyone in the hall and that I could never ‘lose my feet’ while this old man held me.
Then, ‘Ladies to the right, gentlemen to the left. Round you go. Circle twice and lead your partner back to position.’
The music changed. ‘There’s a track, winding back, to an old-fashioned shack, along the road to, Gundagai.’
‘Waaia!’ yelled the young men.
‘First and third gentlemen promenade your partner.’
‘. . . where the blue gums are growing, and the . . . Broken Creek is flowing,’ the boys sang on, improvising to fit Waaia’s geography into the song.
Dad had a barn-dance with me. He wasn’t near so good a dancer as Mum, but what he lacked in skill he made up for with enthusiasm. Holding his partner’s arm shoulder-high at right-angles to the body he swept round whacking people left and right with outstretched arms.
‘I see you’re doing a line with old Bill Leaf,’ Dad said. ‘You couldn’t have got a better bloke to teach you.’
Too soon they called the last dance. It was 2 a.m. and many had long distances to travel home.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, take your partners for the last dance, the Medley!’
I asked Kevin for this dance. He’d been to Waaia Race Balls before and could dance well. The gipsy tap, schottische, polka, mazurka, valeta, circular waltz, Pride of Erin, keel row, military two-step, finishing with the three-hop polka. Faster and faster went the polka, but no one left the floor.
The concertina finished ‘Little Brown Jug’ and the gumleaf player stepped forward. With both hands to the leaf covering his lips he began ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Led by Bill Leaf we formed a circle and held hands slowly circling, everyone singing:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear.
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
Mrs B sang solo then as she evidently always did on these nights. I never knew anyone else besides her who knew the last two verses:
We two have run about the braes,
And pulled the gowans fine,
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot
Since auld lang syne.
We two have paddled in the burn,
From morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
Since auld lang syne.
Then we crossed hands and moved our arms up and down, moving closer and closer, and pulled the circle tighter together as we sang:
And there’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’ us a hand of thine
And we’ll take a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
And the Waaia races were over for another year.
MESSAGE IN GREEN
The Morans were the only people of ‘quality’ to live in Waaia. There were other people of substantial means who owned big properties, but they were ‘colonials’ and even then ‘colonial’ wasn’t considered ‘quality’.
We saw little of this family; they held themselves aloof and when tragedy came to them no one knew how to help. Not that help would have been easy even had they not been so far removed from things we were familiar with. In the tragedy that struck them it was hard to know how to help or give sympathy. And ever after this time it was hard to remember that this had been a family we were in awe of because they were ‘quality’. I remember years later my pretty cousin Mary racing in to say breathlessly to Mum, ‘Auntie Birdie, there’s a most beautiful lady up on the station; a real lady.’
Mickie sauntered in hard on her heels and said, to provoke her, ‘The old bag of rags.’
Mum said, ‘Kathleen!’
‘Well,’ said Kathleen-cum-Mick, ‘she’s got a bee in her bonnet, anyway.’
They were both right. It was Joan Moran. She came into the station once a week driving a spring cart. She sat with a ramrod for a backbone on the cross-bar seat of the dray. She wore a ground-length gown of heavy black silk pinched in at the waist and ornamented with jet braiding on the shoulders and down the leg o’ mutton sleeves to the wrist. Her black toque sat high on her abundant hair; a gossamer veil bound it lightly down round her chin and covered her face to shield her complexion from the sun and wind. As she stepped down, holding her long skirt genteelly with one hand, you could see her black stockings above the level of her high lace-up boots. She looked absolutely regal.
But, ‘She’s high,’ said my sister.
‘Kathleen!’ said Mum.
‘What about the cream?’
There was no denying that. For all that she still affected the elegant dress of fine people, Joan Moran was filthy. Waiting to be collected on the platform were two cans of cream sent back from the butter factory untouched. Pasted round them was a label with big green lettering: OUR MESSAGE IN GREEN: SEND CLEAN CREAM.
Joan in our time at Waaia tried to sell her produce to Nathalia, Numurkah and Tallangatta butter factories, but always the result was the same: they refused it.
Though the slightest speck of dirt upset Mum she always tried to be generous towards this woman and forbade us to show her any disrespect as other kids did when she passed by.
Joan Moran came from Ireland with her family when she was a young woman. There was Mr Moran, his wife, Joan, and her beautiful sister Teresa. They brought their furniture with them from the Old Country and folk who had seen their home on the banks of the Broken Creek said it was the finest ever brought to our part of Victoria. Old man Moran wore a top hat and a morning coat. Mrs Moran and the two girls dressed in the most expensive and elegant – even though dated – clothes we ever saw on those red dirt roads. There were other things about the family that were full of splendour in our eyes, but the most titillating was that the beautiful Miss Teresa was sent to Melbourne to be educated though she was at least seventeen years old – as old as some of our schoolteachers had been! We learnt that this was called going to ‘finishing school’.
In the evening, after tea, when the warm dusk was closing in, I’d play round the only fruit tree we owned, a nectarine to which I ascribed mystical qualities, and pretend that I too was going to finishing school and was learning to walk without running and to wear expensive clothes with ease as did Teresa and Joan Moran. For Joan in the first days of our time at Waaia was a fine young woman only eclipsed in our eyes by the beauty of Teresa.
But all that Teresa Moran learnt at finishing school profited her nothing. Shortly after ‘finishing’ she married, and three weeks after the ceremony returned home to Broken Creek and didn’t leave again. No one outside the family knew what had happened, though everyone made a wild guess.
The Morans took up property in the area that was the original site for Waaia, on Bro
ken Creek, two miles or so from the present town. The word Waaia is Aboriginal for water, and here, where the ‘creek’ which ran only intermittently in other places was as wide as a river, the first settlers came. The Morans had their property on the far side of the wide creek; no one else lived out there except the Dixon family, who lived on the Waaia side of the water. There was Mr Dixon, Mrs Dixon, and their son.
The Dixons were poor and common; the Morans ‘gentry’. They had nothing in common that Waaia knew of. Then one day Mr Dixon murdered Teresa, firing across the wide, deep creek, watched to see her die on the grass, then crawled into a funeral pyre he had built for his own cremation, set it alight and shot himself as the flames burned up around him.
What we made out of those few brief facts was probably no more unlikely than the true story must have been. We believed Mr Dixon – ugly and ordinary as he was – was Teresa’s lover, but because each was already married they were destined never to be together. We believed – especially those of us with enough Irish to know what a fickle paddy such a situation could arouse – that Teresa taunted him until he could bear it no longer.
Mrs Dixon was working as a charwoman for Mrs Young, the wheat-buyer’s wife. It was near sundown and she was walking the two miles back to her home when she saw the great blaze in the tepee-like pile of wood her husband had been building. She ran back to Mrs Young.
‘I know what’s in that fire,’ she gasped. ‘My man’s there, dead. I heard a gun. Now I know why he built that hollow stack of wood, now I know.’
By the time the police had been summoned from Numurkah, there was a murder as well as a suicide to investigate, because by now Teresa’s body had been found.
On the afternoon of her death the beautiful Teresa had been asked to bring in the cows. When she didn’t return by nightfall Joan was sent to see what was keeping her. Joan told us later what she found, told us in the almost incoherent, jumbled speech left her by the shock.
‘Our Teresa should not die,’ she struggled to say. ‘Lying there, blood-soaked grass, blood-soaked Teresa, gossners [geese] blood-soaked, everywhere near the water by herself.’
The police sifted the ashes of the fire and after the inquest Mrs Dixon and her son were allowed to take the box of remains in their jinker and bury them in the cemetery in Numurkah.
‘He always said she was an Irish bitch,’ Mrs Dixon said in our kitchen once. Mum tut-tutted; no one used that sort of language in her hearing. ‘He hated her. He thought she put her cows in our paddock after dark. He used to go out night after night to make sure she didn’t do that. "She’s an Irish bitch," he used to tell me. I think she made googly eyes at him. He wouldn’t have anything to do with her.’
That great blazing pyre on one side of the water and the body of the beautiful Teresa on the other were the subject of much talk, but no more could be added than was already general knowledge.
We had never known the Morans. Their aristocratic bearing created a social moat around them that even tragedy could not ford. Mrs Dixon and her son moved into a little three-roomed cottage in the town, but the Morans stayed on in their big home by the creek. They were not part of us; they were foreign, not because of their nationality, not altogether because of their affluence, but more because of their certainty of life always providing for them. They were not part of that uncertainty that the Depression forced on the rest of us, binding us surely if loosely. Some of the Waaia people had no work; the father of the Green family who lived near the railway gates was away humping his bluey looking for a job; others had only seasonal work lumping wheat. Because Dad had a permanent job we were almost in the aristocrat class ourselves, more comfortable than the wheat-farmers certainly, for they never knew for how long they’d be able to hang on: one error in selling too soon or holding too long was all those times allowed.
It wasn’t until after the old gentleman and lady Moran died that the barrier was broken. Joan didn’t frighten us at all now, because we had something in common; she was a battler like the rest of us. Under the terms of her parents’ will and because the death of Teresa had unseated her mind, Joan was not allowed the handling of the estate or of any money. The church in Numurkah was made trustee until her death. All accounts had to be forwarded there. Joan was so lonely and lost that she sought the companionship of others even though, because of her upbringing more than her recent affliction, she was unable to reciprocate. She would drive in with her can of cream and pull up and talk to anyone she saw, sad and lonely and a bit careless now in her dress, but still at this stage clean in her person.
Then a suitor arrived. The news flashed round the town like a lightning strike. He was young, not too bad-looking, and he was helping her with the farm. And then he had gone and it was all over.
Some boys duck-shooting on the creek said they had seen police and a lawyer out there talking to him. The rumour ran that he was after Joan’s money, that he had coaxed her to marry him. Whatever his intention his attention had brightened Joan up considerably. She was dressing as she had in the old days and was speaking almost normally again.
On her own once more, there was nothing to save Joan. At first when we saw her dirt we thought it was accidental, but soon it was obvious that her mind was as unseated as it had been before the coming of the suitor; worse, she was reverting to the animal. Great drooling dogs hung round her, geese sat on her lap – two of them were curled up with her one day when she arrived in the spring cart. They looked a little dismayed at the length of the journey as they squatted beside the dirty woman.
‘They be Teresa’s gossners,’ she told us.
In the heat of mid-summer she drove in, dressed in her elegant clothes, pinched in tightly at the waist, high-necked, with long tight sleeves and a tiny toque fastened on with the gossamer veil. The veil was sticking to her face with dust and perspiration.
‘Could I have a mug of water, missus,’ this graceful apparition asked as she climbed down.
‘No, Joan,’ Mum said tenderly. ‘Today you’ll come to my house and have a cup of tea.’
Mum sat her in the kitchen and we sat there too, staring when Mum wasn’t watching. And then as Mum handed her a cup of tea I saw a movement on her shoulder and two beetle-like insects walked down her sleeve. Mum turned away. I thought she was going to be sick. She couldn’t eat anything, just drank her tea and tried not to look at Joan.
After Joan left, Mum ordered Mickie and me to take the chair she had been sitting on outside and then all the other chairs, and these we must scrub.
‘Did you see them?’ she gasped. ‘The bugs on her arm. Don’t stand there’ – this last to me who was interested in anything that crawled – ‘go and wash yourself . . . take your clothes off and air them.’ Mum wasn’t herself for days after.
Next week when Joan came to the station she brought a gift of a half-pound of tea, a tin of sugar and a pat of home-made butter, a sort of saffron shade that smelt like her cream. This set Mum off again; she changed colour before our eyes. As soon as Joan drove off Mum hurried down from the station holding the pat of butter at arm’s length and dropped it down the lavatory.
Her panic wasn’t without cause. Strange tales were being told of Joan. The police from Numurkah had visited her one day following a complaint and found she was slaughtering and storing the carcasses of calves in her house to feed her dogs. The house, they found, was filthy beyond cleansing. The trustees were contacted and she was ordered to move out of the old homestead to a little cottage they built her. Joan moved some of the furniture over but still slept in the old place.
One Sunday Kevin and I went out to Broken Creek. We were going to sneak up to Joan’s house and peep through the windows. We got as far as her rickety old gate tied with wire and all her dogs began to bark and her geese to scream. You never heard such a commotion. Geese flew from old farm machinery, out of the trees, up from the creek and out the door of the house. Hideous great dogs lolloped out baying, a battalion of starved mongrels with their ribs almost sticking throu
gh their diseased and scabby skins, froth erupting from their mouths. Kevin and I ran so fast we were out of sight of the house before we stopped for breath. We never went back again and we never told anyone of our visit.
A few weeks after this there was a mission at the church in Numurkah. We never missed a mission. They were the highlights of our liturgical year. Though we had to drive in in the dark with old Billy harnessed to the jinker, it was worth it. We sang all the way in and slept all the way home. This night the church was ablaze with lights and the coloured glass windows were warm and festive. People milled about and everyone knew we were the Smiths from Waaia and had driven ten miles in and would drive ten miles home that night, and they waved to us and asked us to supper afterwards and shook Dad’s hand. Dad always came to the mission, as many non-Catholics did. We always had someone extra to squeeze into the jinker. This night it was a friend of Mickie’s, Rene Martin.
Rene was sitting gaping round at the decorations, the altar sparkling with the hundred candles, flowers in tall silver vases, low bowls with sprays trailing down to the red carpeted floor, statues of angels and saints and the Virgin and Jesus and Joseph, all gaily painted. And in the centre of this constellation of light the great gold monstrance that held the exposed sacrament for the duration of the mission scintillated with a brilliance that dimmed all else. Rene had her head stuck out the end of the seat to see all this and suddenly she gave a cry as a figure went by down the aisle.
‘There’s old Joan!’ she cried aloud.
And sure enough there was Joan Moran in her floor-length dress, her gossamer veil anchoring her elegant hat of thirty years ago on her red bird’s-nest hair.
Old Mrs Dixon lived on in the town for a few months only. Then, one day, just before the train was due, Mum called me. ‘Go quickly. Tell Mrs Young that Mrs Dixon is dead. I’ll meet her there.’
Hear the Train Blow Page 7