Hear the Train Blow
Page 19
Sir Ronald East remembered our paths crossing in the other days. He built the iron-clad water catchment at Nowingi near our home, an innovative attempt to try to trap water from the arid lands; he flew over our home and waved to the two little girls on the platform at Monomeith when we were marooned by the flood-waters and we waved back to him. If only we had known we were waving to a pilot who’d been with the Australian Flying Corps in World War I! To the man who was to become Chairman of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission! Oh, ‘a real big-wig’! Wouldn’t we have been impressed! Actually, no. All we wanted was for the pilot to believe that we were poor little waifs abandoned in the midst of the swirling yellow flood-waters. We were most terribly dramatic.
Readers write to say they have visited Waaia after reading the book and many send me photographs they have taken of the still-small settlement. Waaia boys who had it rough in those hard days are now sporting wide-brimmed hats in keeping with their wide acres, because irrigation has come to their stunted holdings; they look me up when they come down to the city for the Show and it’s grand to see them getting some good years under their belts.
The Mallee is quite unlike we knew it. It is now the olive-green it was before the big rollers cleared it. No farming is permitted on the marginal lands where the soldier settlers broke their hearts, and the scrub has grown again. There are no dust storms – and Melbourne housewives no longer rush to bring the washing in off the line as they had to do when they saw the red clouds of dust drop from the sky in the 1920s and 1930s. The Sunset Country is still a blank space on the map, with Government Bore or Pink Lakes (Salt) marked where there are no roads.
No place we lived in is as we knew it. There is not one station left standing where Mum was station-mistress and Dad folded the big tarpaulins off the trucks for her at night; our homes have gone, every one, with the tank-stands made of sleepers where the tin dish stood for our daily wash, and gone too are the wash-houses where we boiled the copper; there are no trucks in the sidings where we played in the golden days and fettlers travel to work by car and drive labour-saving machines where Dad and his mates toiled with their 28-pound hammers to straighten the rails. ‘For all the good old fettlers are buried out on the hillside,’ as an old railway song goes.
In some ways it is as though we never lived. There is no monument to the toilers of a land and they wouldn’t expect it. But a nation will be poorer if it forgets them.