The Road from Coorain (11 page)

Once they took in the situation my mother faced, they decided to defy the orders they promptly received to return to their respective jobs. Instead, they elected to see her through the harsh first months of bereavement. Their warm hearts, wonderful common sense, and comforting physical presence reassured us children, as my mother grew suddenly thinner, her abundant hair grey almost overnight, and her moods, normally equable, swung to every point of the compass. We struggled through Christmas,
trying to celebrate, but at every point in the day we met memories of my father’s presence the previous year. At the end of January, the boys left for school, and in late February, my uncle finally obeyed the accumulating pile of telegrams and official letters requiring him to return at once to his wartime post. My aunt remained another month, a calming presence, full of life force, cheerfully sustaining our spirits by her questions about our way of life in a remote part of the country she had never visited. Before my uncle left, our former helper Ron Kelly returned, leaving a much better job to take care of Coorain and us once again.

By the time he arrived, we were feeding only seven or eight hundred sheep in two paddocks, and working to preserve the various improvements, bores, wells, sheepyards, and fences from the encroaching sand. Each day, the three of us went out with our loads of wheat, and to work on the now hated burlap troughs. They were hateful because they had become tattered with much use, and required daily attention with patches, twine, and bag needle. There was no way to make the repairs except to sit down in the dust, thread one’s needle, and go at it. With the sun beating down, no hands free to drive away the flies, and the sounds of the ever-hungry and opportunistic cockatoos waiting to tear apart our handiwork, we could not escape awareness of the repetitious and futile nature of our labors.

Each afternoon, Ron set out for another tour of fences: to dig out those sanding up, to treat posts being attacked by white ants under the sand, and to oil and care for all the working parts of the windmills and pumping equipment. At night after the lamps were lit, the silence in the house was palpable. My mother and I read after dinner, but as the time approached for going to bed she would become unaccustomedly nervous and edgy. She found sleeping alone a nightmare, and after a few weeks of sleepless nights she said she needed my company in her bed. After that it was I who had trouble resting, for she clung to me like a drowning person. Alone, without my father, all her fears of the wilderness
returned, and she found the silence as alienating as when she first arrived on the plains. She would often pace the verandas much of the night. Both of us would be grateful for the dawn.

Once a week our friend and neighbor Angus Waugh drove the fifty miles to visit us. He would talk over the state of the sheep and the land with my mother, offer sound advice, and try to make her laugh. I longed for his visits so that for even a few hours the care of this silent and grieving person would not rest only on my shoulders. He could always make me laugh by telling wild nonsense stories, or wickedly funny accounts of the life and affairs of distant residents in the district. My mother, in fact, knew in great detail every aspect of the management of a sheep station. Angus knew this very well, but his weekly presence gave her some adult company, and enabled him to keep a watchful and sensitive eye on how we both were faring.

In February, although my mother was uncertain whether she could afford it, the shearing contractor and his team arrived to crutch our sheep. They followed the bush code of helping those in trouble, and told my mother to pay them when she could, or never if it wasn’t possible. Help appeared from all quarters at crutching time, and our few poor sheep were back in their paddocks before we knew it. My friends on the team never spoke of our bereavement, but they were even more than usually kind about my efforts to keep on top of everything that was happening at the shed.

By the time the boys came home for their holidays in May it was clear that very few of the animals would survive even if it rained within a few weeks. My brothers shot the few remaining large animals we could not feed—the Black Angus bull, formerly the rippling black embodiment of sexual power and energy, now a wraith; the few poor cows; some starving horses. And then in the next weeks the last sheep began to die by the hundreds. We would pile up the carcasses of those that died near the house, douse them with kerosene, and set them alight, to reduce the
pervasive odor of rotting flesh. The crows and hawks were fat, and the cockatoos full-breasted on their diet of wheat, but one by one all other forms of life began to fade away.

After the boys went back to school in June, there was little to do on the place. No amount of digging could prevent the silting-up of fences, and the maintenance of equipment did not require much oversight. Once we were alone again, I was more than usually worried about my mother, because she ate next to nothing, fell to weeping unexpectedly, and seemed much of the time in a trance. The effort expended in getting up and carrying on each day exhausted her. This was combined with the effort expended in refusing to accept the possibility that our enterprise at Coorain might go under. Because this fear was repressed, she was fearful of lesser things. Once when I went riding without telling her, her fury startled me. Once when I went to work on a bore with Ron, an individual who would have died to secure our safety, she gave me a tongue-lashing about never again working alone with him.

Shortly after these explosions, Angus arrived for one of his visits. He took a walk with me and asked how we were doing. As I shook my head, uncertain about how to say what was on my mind, he supplied the words for me. “You’re worried about your mother, aren’t you,” he said. I nodded. “She doesn’t eat?” “That’s right,” I said. “She’s depressed?” I nodded. “You ought to leave here,” he said. “There’s not a bloody thing you two can do here now. The pair of you look like something out of Changi and it’s to no purpose. Would you like to leave, live like a normal child and go to school?” I felt a great wave of relief. “Yes,” I said.

That night Angus talked to my mother as they took a walk around the house and grounds. I heard snatches, and realized that he was playing the other side of the argument skillfully. “You can’t keep Jill here forever. It’s not right. She should be in school. Neither of you can do anything here. Look at her. She’s so skinny she could come from a concentration camp. It’s time to leave and
go to Sydney, and let her get on with her life. You can hire a manager to take care of this place, and I’ll watch over it for you.”

The next morning my mother eyed me as though I were a stranger. I was certainly a sight. I was in my eleventh year, so underweight my clothes for an eight- or nine-year-old hung on me, and as Angus said, I looked worried enough to be an old woman. Once she noticed my appearance the matter was settled for my mother. She began to make plans for us to leave.

With Angus’s help we found a splendid manager. Geoff Coghlan was a thoroughly knowledgeable man about sheep and cattle, and the ways of our western plains country. He had been too young to participate in the 1914–1918 War, and a few years too old to join the armed forces in the 1939–1945 War, then wending toward Allied victory in Europe, and more slowly toward the defeat of Japan in the Pacific. Margaret, his wife, was the daughter of near neighbors, and Coorain offered them a home of their own. Given that my mother would live in Sydney, where I could attend a good school, our new managers would have relative independence to run things their way. It was agreed that they would move to Coorain early in August 1945, and we would depart close to the end of the month.

The actual prospect of departure evoked complicated emotions. The house, the garden, the vistas of space were the only landscape I knew. The ways of the backcountry were second nature, and I associated Sydney with stiff formal clothes, sore feet, and psychological exhaustion from coping with unaccustomed crowds. Yet I knew I could not deal unaided with my mother’s grief and despair. As time passed, the energy she had summoned to manage the immediate details of life after my father’s death was dissipated, and she sank into a private world of sorrow from which I could not detach her. I was lonely and grief-stricken myself. I had come to hate the sight of the desolate countryside, the whitening bones, and the all-pervasive dust. I,
too, was consumed with anxiety because the experience of cumulative disaster had darkened my mood, and made me see the fates as capricious and punishing.

Yet to leave Coorain was almost beyond my comprehension. Each day I prepared myself for the departure by trying to engrave on my memory images that would not fade—the dogs I loved best, the horse I rode, the household cat, the shapes of trees. Ever since my father’s death I had called his figure and voice to mind each morning as I woke, determined not to let it fade. Now I did the same with each familiar detail of life. It was strange to hear my mother and Mrs. Coghlan discuss what equipment should stay at Coorain, what china and glass should go with us. The familiar shapes of pots and pans, the patterns on the china—all took on a life of their own. Hitherto they had been simple aspects of the world that was.

Before we left, we made a visit to Clare Station, some fifty miles to the west, to spend two nights with Angus, his sister Eileen, and his younger brother Ron. Their parents had taken up a vast acreage in the 1880s, moving out onto the plains driving their sheep before them, transporting their belongings in bullock wagons. Clare, as they had named their property, had once been larger than its current five hundred thousand acres. It had been so large it was virtually a small town, with such extensive stables and accommodations that it could comfortably serve as a stop for the Cobb and Company coaches which traveled the west before the railroad and the automobile. The second generation of the Waughs were a formidable Scottish clan, thrifty, hardworking, generous, excellent businessmen. I had never seen anything at once so large and at the same time so haphazard. The station homestead was organized around a courtyard, three sides of which were bedrooms and bathrooms, arranged in no order I could discern. One walked across a second courtyard to the vast dining room, itself a good five-minute walk from the kitchens, set well away in case of fire. Everyone laughed about the fact that this
inconvenient distance made the meals always lukewarm, but no one seemed to mind. The furniture was massive, leather-covered sofas and oak chairs surrounded the fireplaces in two adjoining sitting rooms. Huge gilt-framed landscapes of Scottish scenes adorned the walls. These I studied carefully, having never seen real paintings on canvas, let alone pictures of such unfamiliar highland sheep and cattle. Scattered over the faded linoleum floors were Oriental rugs. Things were well worn but clearly no one fretted over polishing them the way my mother did. Before dinner, everyone drank Scotch neat. Water was regarded as harmful to the taste. Angus told me his parents had still toasted “the king over the water” in his childhood, and that he remembered the rooms decorated with tartans. The woolshed was massive, like the house and its contents. The shed was large enough to shear what had once been a herd of forty thousand sheep. Everything—quarters for station hands, stables, yards, sheds for farm equipment—seemed on a gargantuan scale to me, just as the vast paintings of highland landscapes seemed to dwarf the people in the living rooms. I loved to hear Angus tell stories about the pioneering days of his parents, and the way of life before railways and cars made such city comforts as store-bought canned goods accessible. Clare had experienced the same disasters as we had at Coorain, but ten lean years made little difference to the family fortune. On a station of this size, one could wait out the seasons with relative composure.

When the time came for us actually to pack for the train journey, I began to feel a strange emptiness in the pit of my stomach. My consciousness departed to some relatively distant point above my body, and I looked down at what seemed almost pygmy-size figures going about the business of departure. My mother, faced with a practical task, was her systematic self. Suitcases and trunks were packed. Boxes of china and linen, a few books, our clothes. But everything else remained, and I realized that we were going into the world outside relatively lighthanded. She broke down over the packing of my father’s clothes. I, for my
part, refused to pack any toys or dolls. I knew that in most important ways my childhood was over.

When the day of our departure dawned, it arrived as both a relief and a sentence. I wanted the break over, yet I could not bear to say good-bye. I was up and dressed early, uncomfortable in my town clothes. I took one last walk and found I had no heart for it. We drank the inevitable cup of morning tea as the bags and boxes were loaded. Suddenly, we were in the car driving away from Coorain. I looked back until it sank from sight beneath the horizon. My mother gazed resolutely ahead. In ten minutes it was all over.

Departures for Sydney by train took place at the small railroad station at Ivanhoe, some forty miles north of Coorain. There was little to the town but a cluster of railroad maintenance workers’ huts, some shunting yards, and a set of stockyards for loading sheep and cattle. A store, a garage, a road haulage company, and a few more ample houses lined the dusty main street. The train itself was the most impressive part of the landscape. The passenger train we rode on for half the journey to Sydney was one of our few chances to encounter modernity. It was diesel-powered, streamlined, air-conditioned, painted a dazzling silver to evoke the site of its origin, Broken Hill, an inland silver mining center. When the boys rode it to school, my father had always tipped the porter so that the boredom of their journey could be broken by an exciting ride in the engine cabin, actually watching the needle of the speedometer climb past eighty miles an hour. When the diesel engine had built up speed, it purred along effortlessly while the countryside outside raced by at a bewildering rate. The Diesel, as we called it, announced itself twenty or more minutes before its arrival by the huge column of red dust it churned up as it tore across the plains. We spent the twenty minutes in careful goodbyes, and then piled quickly into the train which stopped only a merciful three minutes in the station. We both now wanted this ordeal over.