The Dressmaker's Daughter (9 page)

S
urrounded as we were by water, my childhood was one of measuring it out, if not drop by drop, at least bucket by bucket. Our house faced the bay, which stretched to the eastern horizon, and as far as we could see, to islands on the south end of its extremity and to desolate diminishing sand dunes at the northern end. It seemed that we never looked inland. We looked to that blue horizon.

Our water tank held all the water the family had, year in, year out. With a rainfall of only fourteen inches (355.6 millimetres) annually, water was precious. At the tap above the sink in the kitchen there was a metal wash basin. When the washing-up was done, the suds were taken out and tipped onto the tomatoes or whatever was growing in the vegetable garden. Seaweed was gathered in our wheelbarrow and piled thickly round the tomatoes as mulch. There were, I think, never any flowers apart from Californian poppies, which were my father’s specialty. They needed almost no water.

Each evening before bed, one of our mother’s helpers bathed us. Two by two we went into the bath, which was heated with a roaring woodchip heater. Lit, dangerous and explosive, it seemed exciting and I liked the sudden transformation of cold water into hot that seemed to happen instantaneously. A flare and a roar and it was off.

As the first two children climbed or were lifted, depending on their age, from the bath, the next two were lowered into it. We were already fed, so now we were ready for bed. It was still light.

The bathwater waited, growing cold for our parents, who bathed later. Our mother took the next bath, and finally our father. I always felt sorry for him because by then the water must have been cooling, as there was a limit to how much water they felt they could afford to use for the bath on a single night. But he said he didn’t mind, so I stopped worrying.

None of this water was wasted either. It, too, was bailed out and ladled onto the garden.

When my brothers and I weren’t playing our game ‘Sheep’ with quandong stones and building paddocks with clothes pegs, we played on the beach and in the sea. If we had been in the sea, we didn’t have a bath, only our hands and feet and faces were washed.

At the beach, we played with water for hours, running down the sand with small tin buckets that Mrs Swiggs had made us. Moats and rivers were our games and as they
faded into the sand we ran and swilled them full again. Water had a mystery. It was there, and then not there. It was ever present, and ever vanishing. It filled tanks and yet there never seemed to be enough and we could never waste it.

Iron pumps stood above every underground tank or well or bore and we pumped these heavy, black, ornate, cast-iron Victorian curves with a will. To see the water gush. To prime the pump by pouring a silver dipper of water down the mouth of it, and then to have it regurgitate up with a flood of extra water in a fluid plait was a game we fought for turns to play.

Later, when we were adults, I could shampoo my hair, rinse it and wash my whole body with the water held in a two litre ice-cream container. I learnt to do this when I travelled through deserts with my middle brother, Bill. It gave me a curious pleasure to be so frugal. I did not have to wait until we reached the Birdsville Hotel or Cooper’s Creek. My childhood stood me in good stead. Sometimes I think I could have done the job with a thimbleful of water.

O
n the west coast of South Australia, white pointer sharks, King George whiting, tommy ruffs, snook and the biggest snapper to be found anywhere are what men fished for. Cane laundry baskets were used to carry the fish when there was a big catch. Sometimes fish that weren’t whiting were simply thrown back. When there was a very large catch, a man called Pompa, who was a hero to Tucker, would be given the extra fish to smoke. There was no refrigeration, and if Pompa did not smoke the extra part of the catch, it was wasted.

Tucker had a pair of rubber boots because he loved Pompa and Pompa wore rubber boots, too. He followed the old man down the jetty, trying to walk with the same gait.

Who was Pompa and where did he live? His other name was Harris and he lived alone in a stone hut he had built on the edge of town. Mainly he lived by barter. Our mother gave him tomatoes, and sometimes a roast dinner
was cut off and left covered with a soup plate to be given to Pompa to take home to eat.

Whiting love cockles. That is the main bait that has always been used for them. Mainly they were caught on lines with sinkers made of lead, which I remember our father making by pouring hot lead from a billy-can into holes he had made in a box of sand. Sometimes the fishermen used nets. These nets were dyed by making a broth of wattle bark, which was soaked for days in an old tin bath kept in our shed. The tannin from the bark protected the twine of the net. The whole business of making sinkers, soaking nets and mending nets took hours and was a source of astonishment to children.

Sometimes, on the end of the Tumby Bay and Port Lincoln jetties, a white pointer shark was hung, malevolent and gigantic, blood seeping from the jaw. As I stood with my brothers below, it seemed to hang far up in the sky. Nobody explained that these sharks were dangerous and that we should not swim far out from shore, but somehow we knew it. We dreaded sharks far more than snakes. Yet one of the deadliest snakes in the world lived in the sand dunes where we played. The death adder. At that time there was no antivenene but nobody ever died, as far as I know, from the bite of a death adder. And neither did anybody die from a shark attack, although divers nowadays do.

My brother Peter says that now abalone divers are taken because they work down deep where the sharks are. Spear fishers are eaten too, but there were none around when we were children. Abalone was not seen as a delicacy; neither were mussels nor cockles nor leather jackets nor salmon trout. They were used as bait.

Our dinghy was anchored in shallow water. One afternoon, my three brothers were playing around the boat. While my mother sat sewing on the sand where I was playing, one of the boys untied the anchor rope. The tide took the boat out to sea. When our mother looked up, the boys were heading out into the bay with the oars resting on the benches and not locked into the rowlocks. While Tucker knew how to row, he was too young to get the oars into the rowlocks, so the boys had no method of stopping the boat. The swelling tide took the boatful of boys further out. Our mother, shrieking, dropped her sewing and ran into the sea. She managed to reach the boat and drag it back to shallow water.

Somebody ran up to Elder Smith’s office and fetched our father. He drove us home, our mother dripping wet. Tucker said to a neighbour later, ‘Mum got wet – right up to where she feeds the baby.’

I
was twelve before I ever rode in a bus or a train. If we weren’t driven in a car, we flew. Port Lincoln had an airport and it was from there our family caught planes to take us to the city. The plane held about eight passengers. With six of us, and May or Gertie or Jane to help my mother, we took up almost all of the seats.

The air-hostess wore a navy blue uniform and a smart cap like an envelope opened out, sitting jauntily aside her head. Her legs in stockings and high-heeled shoes disappeared down the aisle. She handed out glucose sweets before we took off and before we landed.

The journey across two gulfs included a stop or two at airports along the coast. By the time we got to Whyalla, all three of my brothers were vomiting. Brown paper bags were placed in a net on the back of the seats. On one trip my mother said triumphantly to a friend after we had landed, ‘We used up every paper bag!’ (The friend was there to collect us from Parafield Airport with its long
white wind socks flying aslant, mysterious as Tibetan prayer flags.)

We were driven to the city where we were taken in to see Nanna Brinkworth. Sitting up in bed, with a tray across her thin knees, her hair piled up in a full, floppy silver bun, pins awry, wearing a fine pink knitted bed jacket, Nanna would greet us mockingly. Living on a diet of burnt toast, bananas and milk tea, Nanna would sometimes arise and dress in dark, elegant clothes. The burnt toast was not an accident; it was burnt deliberately because she had been told that charcoal kept heart disease away.

When our visit to Nanna was over, we were driven to the Barossa Valley to stay with Granny Shemmeld at Angaston. There the house was filled with the aromas of German yeast cake, Brasso, wood smoke, tea and brandy. The whole town smelt vaguely of yeast.

When the holiday was over, we took the plane again and the vomiting and the counting of brown paper bags began again.

J
aundice was the disease that helped save our grandfather at Gallipoli (he was evacuated sick from the 11th Light Horse in October 1915), and then, in the next war, it was the one that his son, our father, contracted.

This time, jaundice marked another departure: my family’s from Tumby Bay. None of us, I think, had ever considered that we would leave.

The reason our father became jaundiced was that, at this time, because of the war, there was a petrol shortage. As a result, Elder Smith managers had charcoal-burning gas-producers placed on the back of their cars.

My mother wrote in her autobiography:

These dirty things had to have bags of coke tipped into them. Sometimes when Brink arrived home he looked like a black minstrel. It was at this time that his health became poor. Once, when I was returning
from Adelaide, Brink met me at the airport near Port Lincoln. He looked so ill I thought he was dying. He then developed yellow jaundice and became an awful colour. He was put on a very strict diet, with all food having to be boiled.

Elders eventually realised the long trips using the gas-producer were too much for my father and they sent him on a month’s holiday.

It was at this time that John, the office boy, brought word that we were to move to Minlaton. This was a shock. Tumby Bay had been our home for twelve years. It was hard to contemplate leaving there – leaving all our friends.

I now think that this was a calamity that marked us all for life. No other place ever seemed to me to have any quality compared to what we had left.

I heard the news when I came home from school one day and found my mother having afternoon tea with a friend. She was telling her friend that we were going to leave. I burst into tears. My mother laughed and told the woman that I had not known before. She seemed amused that I was upset.

Minlaton, which was where we were sent, was laid out in a grid pattern (unlike our previous town, which was curved around the bay). You could say it was the difference between romanticism and classicism. Classicism was a harsh shock.

No sea, few trees, arid, new to us, and the barley capital of the State, it was, above all, not Tumby Bay.

I was sent to the newly built high school, which was made of movable huts mounted on small stilts. The school had a marvellous atmosphere and I learnt that buildings are not important as to how an institution flourishes.

The science teacher was Reuben Goldsworthy and he, we pupils believed, was in love with one of the two sisters who had come to teach from the city – Jan, our French teacher. She loved French and she loved the dark-haired Mr Goldsworthy. (My friend Peter Goldsworthy, the novelist and poet, is their son.)

On Arbour Day, when children all over the continent planted trees, we were taken out to a bare block and given small trees to plant. We laughed and fooled about and I paid no attention to those trees. I was much more interested in showing off to my friends. These green saplings were the first trees I ever planted but they were not to be my last. What I began carelessly later became an obsession.

At this time, my mother began, more or less by accident, to keep cows. It was, in fact, the beginning of my parents’ farming, although they could not have known it then.

Next to our house, Elder Smith had a vacant block of land. Mr Shaw, our neighbour, was allowed to graze his cow, Brindle, there. My mother took his cow a bucket of water on hot days because, although she was afraid of
cows, she didn’t like to think of it being without a drink all day. Gradually she began to pat the cow.

Mr Shaw then had asked my mother if she would milk Brindle while he went on holidays. She did it, and had the use of the milk for all of us. Then, nothing would do but for her to have a cow of her own.

This cow, which had just had a calf, was also called Brindle. But she bucked and kicked and had to have a bail built to hold her while she ate and was milked. Once, when my mother released her and turned away, she drank the bucket of milk of which she’d just been drained. My mother said that she had a curious impulse to pump Brindle’s tail to regain the milk.

Soon there were two other cows and two more calves. Rearing animals and acquiring land are an ancient equation that, from then on, gripped my parents and my brothers. From Brindle grew herds. From public parkland where the first cows were grazed, grew stations.

I was an immense talker in class. Nothing it seemed could stop me. I was punished in every way the teachers could conceive. And still I talked. In despair, the headmaster said that I must go back into a lower class. In other words, shame was to attempt to achieve what berating and smacking could not. It had no effect.

One evening, as my mother was leading Brindle in from the park to be milked, she met Mr Burton, the headmaster. He was hitting a golf ball around the grass.

They spoke for a while and he told my mother he was in despair over me. She came home and said with astonishment that Mr Burton had had tears in his eyes when he spoke about me.

Soon after that, perhaps because I understood the effect I had had, I was put back into my normal class. Shame did work, but it was not the shame of being put in a lower class; it was the fact that I could make a teacher weep. Suddenly I became the perfect student, hand rising to every question put to class. If I didn’t know the answer, I made something up. I went from bad to good overnight.