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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781925581638 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Spinifex Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2019 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Burning with Madame Bovary
1.
The street – the only one – is about a gunshot in length, has a few shops on either side, and stops short at the end of the road.
Madame Bovary, Flaubert
In the furnace heat of late summer, 1956, I started school in Wilcannia. It was the year the British government began its bomb tests at Maralinga, and Amy Witting's first published short story 'The Strait of Hellespont' appeared in Southerly. There is no photograph of my milestone morning, and none of the schoolhouse – a small, dust-plain building in which seven grades sat facing the front in its single, stifling, unadorned classroom. My mother owned a box Brownie camera, but she might not have had a roll of film for it that day, or the money to buy one. Then again, photographs were often ruined when handling those early cameras: if the back was inadvertently opened, a burst of Outback light was all it took to burn-out an image. And even if a photograph was taken, our family moved many times in the years that followed: inevitably, things were lost; they were left behind, or discarded.
In place of a photograph there are flashes of memory: children standing in ragged lines on the unpaved playground; pepper trees in dusty corners of the yard; a huddle of white mothers, talking and laughing; a few black mothers who had risen early to cross the iron bridge over the Darling River, small children shyly clinging to their cotton skirts. I must have been excited to be starting school, a child who was already a fluent reader. Perhaps it was the line-up that rattled my confidence, a sense of the beginning of submissiveness. At the last moment I refused to join the other children, and when the teacher insisted, I kicked her in the shins and bolted.
My mother still remembers the uproar but has forgotten the double-decker wooden pencil case she offered as a bribe. It was the most desirable object in the town. I must have seen it in a shop and been told it was too expensive, but my poor mother, who detests a fuss, promised that I should have it if I would stand in line. So I swallowed my tears, and the hastily acquired pencil case was in my hands before lunch. Its sliding lid fitted smoothly; its two sections swivelled to reveal the secret lower chamber; pencils sat snugly inside, with a small compartment for an eraser and a sharpener. I would line up again today for such a treasure.
A frontier town in north-west New South Wales, Wilcannia's name is said to derive from an Aboriginal word that means 'gap in the bank where floodwaters escape', or else it means 'wild dog', or it means neither of these things. Back in the 1880s it was an important river port, with thirteen hotels and its own newspaper, the Western Grazier, started by an Irish printer and journalist, James Smith Reid. By the time we came to live in Wilcannia its glory days were over, but the Knox &Downs store, where you could buy almost anything, was still in business, and the nineteenth-century sandstone buildings that had sprung up in the town's heyday were not yet derelict or boarded up, as they would be twenty years later.
One of the first Europeans to explore the area in 1835 was Major Thomas Mitchell, poet, painter, and the last man in Australia to fight a duel. At one time two of Charles Dickens's sons, and one of Anthony Trollope's, were listed as members of the Wilcannia Cricket Club. Remote and inhospitable as a star, Wilcannia had a certain swagger.
Our rented house on Reid Street backed on to the Darling River. There were struggling fruit trees and a dilapidated hen house in the long backyard, which fell away to the tea-coloured, slow-flowing river. The water was said to be treacherous, mined with potholes and fallen branches, and with sly currents that would tug you from the bank and suck you under. But in those endless, battering summers, warnings often went unheeded, and a child drowned in the river the year I started school – a small white boy, burdened with a clumpy boot and leg brace from his brush with childhood polio.
The snaking river divided white from black, with the iron, centre-lift bridge between, but at school I shared a desk with an Aboriginal girl called Anna. Her people would have been Barkindji, which I now know means 'belonging to the river'. After school I walked home to the house on Reid Street, while Anna crossed the bridge to the makeshift shelters we could see from the bottom of our yard. Whole families lived there in the semi-open without even basic facilities, and at night, especially, we could hear them – laughing, singing, quarrelling – and smell the smoke from their campfires.
The separation of black and white in 1950s Australia is a thread in Amy Witting's 'The Strait of Hellespont', a story in which party guests discuss a row that has raged in the newspapers over whether Aborigines should be allowed to use the local baths. When challenged on her opinion that the letter writers don't know what they're talking about, one of the characters, Morna Christie, spits out that the blacks are "riddled with disease". Morna is temporarily silenced by Iris Lunney, who points out that a white man with the pox can still use the baths: "the dirty word exploded from her mouth like a little firecracker of anger". But Morna is not crushed; if anything, her view hardens.
I have often tried to put myself back into that Wilcannia classroom, curious to know how and what we were taught, and how we children got along together. But all I can glean from memory are a few trivial facts: we were given slates and chalk to write our first letters; in the airless afternoons it was impossible not to fall asleep; most of us had bobbed hair, for there were no hairdressers, or if there were they were not for children.
On Reid Street, our next door neighbours were a white couple given to violent, alcohol-fuelled domestic arguments. The woman sometimes spoke to my mother over the fence, blaming her slurred speech on radiation from the tests at Maralinga. That year, four nuclear devices were exploded, code-named 'One Tree', 'Marcoo', 'Breakaway', and 'Kite'; the latter, released by a Royal Air Force bomber from a height of 35,000 feet, was the first British nuclear weapon to be dropped from an aircraft. The radioactive cloud from 'One Tree' reached a height of 37,500 feet, and radioactivity was recorded in South Australia, the Northern Territory, New South Wales, and Queensland.
Years later, at parties, when my mother had had a glass of wine or a beer, she would relate these conversations as amusing anecdotes.
"It's rrrrr ... adiation!" She would roll the 'r' as our neighbour used to, roll her eyes, too, and flutter her eyelids, to general merriment.
It seems unthinkable that radioactive contamination could have raised a laugh, but the Maralinga tests were surrounded by such secrecy that for at least two decades people like my parents and their friends remained ignorant of the hazards. More puzzling is how our apparently alcohol-addled neighbour had acquired her grip on current affairs in a place where the outside world felt, and was, so far away. Perhaps in her hot little kitchen, nursing her bumps and bruises and her hangovers, she listened to the radio, although contemporary media coverage of the tests was tightly controlled, and weak. Chances are the couple had a son, or other relative, one of the Australian airmen who flew through the mushroom cloud, or one of the mechanics, builders, engineers, or servicemen – around eight-thousand of them – who were on the ground at Maralinga.
As for us, we had books, transported a box at a time from Broken Hill, or gathered by my father on long distance truck trips. We always had our noses in a book, and my precocious reading habit was formed in Wilcannia, for there really was nothing else to do, most evenings. Except sometimes in summer, when the supply of books dried up, or the heat inside the house became unbearable, then we would lie outside on a blanket, telling stories and stargazing.
* * *
2.
In the back-yard you could hear the chickens squawking as the servant girl chased after them to wring their necks.
Madame Bovary, Flaubert
After a succession of primary schools, five in all, I started high school in Mount Gambier. All was going smoothly until the curriculum for girls was split: one stream of students would study French, Latin, English, and art, while the others would take typing, and shorthand, and bookkeeping, the so-called Commercial Course. I forget what the first choice was called, but it was the one I wanted. However, my father put his foot down firmly on this silliness: I would learn shorthand and typing so that I could earn a living; it was up to him to ensure I would never starve. I wept for a week, and my arguments for French and Latin and art were ignored. Back then, fathers made those choices, and daughters mostly obeyed.
I was inconsolable, although looking back I cannot blame my father. He was from a working class family – miners, farm workers, jacks of all trades – and had done his apprenticeship as a fitter and turner in Broken Hill. As the eldest of four children raised during the depression years, he knew how hard it could be to put food on the table. He had hated his trade and left the mines as soon as he could, and in an astonishing career leap that I'm not sure would happen today he went from driving trucks loaded with wool or goats around the Outback, to working in radio, and later in television. But he knew that lucky breaks were rare, and he had resolved that I would be equipped to support myself.
If bookkeeping was dull, shorthand was at least a kind of language. But the typing class was a form of brainwashing in which we sat with our hands under the typewriter covers and chanted in unison: a s d f; l k j, ad infinitum. These were the home keys on the heavy machines on which we were taught to type until our wrists and fingers ached – Imperial, Olivetti, Remington. Girls often fainted in typing class, slipping off hard, upright chairs and under the desks, overwhelmed by the noise, the numbing boredom, and what Isobel Callaghan in Amy Witting's I for Isobel calls the "misery" of "dehumanising solitude". Meanwhile, other girls, the girls I envied, were studying French. Somehow I acquired the text book and tried to teach myself in private, weeping over words I was uncertain how to pronounce. They were as mysterious and lovely as the elements of a spell, those words. The French language itself was a spell, I felt certain, if only I could learn to cast it.
But what did teenage girls in country towns want with Latin and French and art? What use would it be to them? I see now that the girls I envied were allowed to choose those subjects because their parents knew it would make no difference: when they left school they would marry and have children; they would stay at home and keep house. So where once I was furious that my father's vision for my future was so small, so stunted, with hindsight I realise that – by his lights, and at that time – it had actually been quite grand.
* * *
3.
And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what that chance would be ...
Madame Bovary, Flaubert
Emma Bovary's craving for an indefinable excitement, her longing for colour, must have been commonplace among young women in these years I am writing about. The cultural explosion in the 1960s was slow to shake South Australia, and girls like me, unwilling to accept life as it had been laid out for them – its ordinariness, its drudgery – and for whom a university education seemed unreachable, were forced to live much of the time in a dream world. It was a craving like Emma Bovary's that plunged me into, and out of, an early marriage. It sent me flying across the Tasman, alone for the first time in my life, and sustained only by those modest skills acquired in typing class. As it turned out, I was grateful for them.
The wooden houses of Wellington were quaint; its hills were lush, its bays sparkling. I found employment as a typist in the newsroom at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. Then, three months after I had arrived, my father died. I returned to Sydney for his funeral, and in the disorienting days of grief there I was sorely tempted to pick up the threads of my old life and stay. And yet I returned to Wellington. In letters home I had complained of its dowdiness, and its freezing winter, but the city, and the small place in it that I had begun to make for myself, was like a dream that I wanted to keep on dreaming.
After a few false starts I found myself living in a yellow wooden house on Tinakori Road in Thorndon. It was Katherine Mansfield territory, and the settings of her short stories were all around. The rent was twenty-five dollars a week; it was a stretch on my typist's salary, but I loved the house fiercely. It was where I began to write, though I never dared whisper, even to myself, that I might become a writer. At work, surrounded by young, university-educated journalists, I was ashamed of having cut short my schooling. In conversation I skated over that fact as best I could, for I could not help equating a lack of education with stupidity. But a spark was struck there in the house in Thorndon; who knows why or how. On Friday afternoons I would borrow a typewriter from work, and struggle up the long hill of Bowen Street with it in my arms.
My flat was on the top floor – one bedroom, bathroom, a kitchen and sitting room with windows overlooking the Wellington Botanic Garden – and my front door, mine alone, was at the back, approached via a little curved footbridge: it was a house from fairy tale.
The kitchen had a gas stove and an ancient fridge, but no pots and pans. After moving in, I walked down Tinakori Road to the dairy to buy something for tea, and the soft-faced Maori woman behind the counter greeted me with a sunny smile.
"No pans! Hey, don't worry, I got plenty." Beaming, she pressed a frying pan and a battered aluminium saucepan into my hands. "Bring them back when you're ready," she said.
I carried home baked beans, bread, and a tin opener, but it was only with her saucepan on the stove that I realised the gas was disconnected. I ate the beans cold, and mixed Milo with hot water from the shower. That night I froze under a single thin blanket, and finally rose at three, shivering, to spread clothes from my suitcase over the bed.
I lived in that house as girls of slender means have lived in flats and bedsits all over the world, and in stories, relishing my independence one minute and wringing my hands over my impoverished circumstances the next. Others recognised the fairy tale of a girl living alone in a little wooden house on a hill, and they found their way over the footbridge: once, late at night, a television journalist I knew slightly arrived without shoes, having fled her violent husband. I made up a bed for her on the sofa, but that is another story – or perhaps it does belong here in this account of how it was sometimes, to be young and female in the second half of the twentieth century.
Despite the occasional visitors, I spent much time alone in the buttercup house, including the loneliest few days of my life. It was the New Year's Eve after my father died – the night before my twenty-second birthday; I sat at the kitchen window watching tail lights diminish up Tinakori hill, and celebrated at midnight with raspberries and cream, and a glass of wine from the bottle the landlord had left for Christmas. I didn't see anyone to speak to until the third of January, when I returned to work. In a letter to my mother I wrote: I'm getting too old to attach much importance to birthdays, but it would be nice to have a happy one. I haven't enjoyed a birthday since I was small and used to get a party dress, and an ice-cream cake, and a doll. It was the closest I ever came to Isobel Callaghan's uncelebrated birthday, though Amy Witting would not finish writing I for Isobel until 1979, and the book would not fall into my hands until the century had turned.
In Thorndon I started French lessons; I beat out letters on the borrowed typewriter, and tentatively began a children's novel. When the family who lived downstairs said they could hear me typing I told them I was studying, and since I always stopped at a reasonable hour they remained good-natured. In Amy Witting's story 'The Writing Desk', young, aspiring writer Emily pretends to her dreadful landlady that she is writing a thesis rather than admit she is working on a novel. Witting's young women, like Emily, and Isobel Callaghan, know that there is something about a girl reading, writing, and showing a preference for solitude that provokes people. According to Isobel it contravenes The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not be different. As well as these first fumbling attempts at writing I still had my nose in a book, and at weekends I would read all night because there was no one to say I couldn't. But after a year I had to relinquish the buttercup house; its beauty was a luxury I had never really been able to afford. Even the landlord shed a tear for me, though he did not offer to lower the rent.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Happiness Glass"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Carol Lefevre.
Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press Pty Ltd.
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