The Road from Coorain (8 page)

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FTER THE GREAT
rain of 1939, the rainfall declined noticeably in each successive year. In 1940, the slight fall was of no consequence because our major worry was that the accumulation of growth on the land would produce serious bushfires. These did occur on land quite close to us, but my father’s foresight in getting cattle to eat down the high grass preserved Coorain from that danger.

In 1941, the only rain of the year was a damp cold rain with high wind which came during the lambing season in May and June and carried off many ewes and their newborn lambs. After that there were no significant rainfalls for five years. The unfolding of a drought of these dimensions has a slow and inexorable quality. The weather perpetually holds out hope. Storm clouds gather. Thunder rolls by. But nothing happens. Each year as the season for rain approaches, people begin to look hopefully up at the sky. It mocks them with a few showers, barely enough to lay the dust. That is all.

It takes a long time for a carefully managed grazing property to decline, but three years without rain will do it. Once the disaster begins it unfolds swiftly. So it was with us.

My parents, buoyed up by the good year of 1939, the results of that good year returned in the 1940 wool sales, the new water supply, and the new woolshed, remained hopeful for a long time.
By 1942, it was apparent that the drought could be serious and their levels of anxiety began to climb. I was conscious of those anxieties in a variety of ways. That year, 1942, my eighth, was my first one of correspondence school. There was no governess, nor was there any pretense that I would keep a daily school schedule. On Friday afternoons, from 2:00 p.m. until I finished (usually around 4:30 p.m.), I did my week’s school. My mother made it a pleasant occasion for me by saying, “Today, you don’t have to work out of doors. You can sit in the shade [or if it was winter, in the sun] on the veranda, have your own pot of tea, and do your schoolwork.” Thus I was introduced to study as a leisure activity, a gift beyond price. When I was close to finishing, my mother would arrive to glance quickly over the work. Then she questioned me closely about the state of each paddock, what my father had said about it when we were there last, and then, ever so discreetly, she would lead me to talk about how he had seemed as we worked together that week. I needed no instruction not to mention these conversations. I knew why she was anxious.

My father and I would set out to work on horseback as usual, but instead of our customary cheerful and wide-ranging conversations he would be silent. As we looked at sheep, or tried to assess the pasture left in a particular paddock, he would swear softly, looking over the fence to a neighbor’s property, already eaten out and beginning to blow sand. Each time he said, “If it doesn’t rain, it will bury this feed in a few weeks.” It was true and I could think of nothing consoling to say.

His usual high spirits declined with the state of the land, until the terrible day when many of our own sheep were lost because of a sudden cold rain and wind when they had too little food in their stomachs. Although my mother produced her usual ample meals, he began to lose weight his bony frame could ill afford. He lost his wonderful calm, and deliberation in planning, and would be excited by the slightest sign of trouble. A few years ago, a bore losing water flow would have meant there was a problem with the pump, requiring some days’ labor to repair it. Now he would
instantly worry about whether the water supply was running dry. We would fall to work on raising the pump and assessing the problem as though disaster were at hand.

My mother was impatient with this excitability and in my father’s presence, would try to deflate it. But I knew from her questions that she too was worried. When the work to be done on the run didn’t need two people, my father would say, “Stay home and help your mother, she needs help in the house.” My mother would let him set out for the stables or the garage and then say to me, “I don’t need help. Run quickly and go with your father. See if you can make him laugh.” So I would set out, and begin to play the child I no longer was. I would think up nonsense rhymes, ask crazy questions, demand to be told stories, invent some of my own to recount. Sometimes it would have the desired effect, but it was hard to distract a man from the daily deterioration of our land and flocks. Every time we stopped to look at the carcass of a dead sheep and dismounted to find out why it had died, it became more difficult to play my role.

My brothers would return home from boarding school to a household consumed with anxiety. Coming, as they did, from the totally enclosed world of a school, with its boyish high spirits, it was hard for them to change emotional gear and set immediately to work on whatever projects had been saved for a time when there were several extra pairs of strong hands available. Mealtimes were particularly difficult because inevitably their world contained many points of reference beyond Coorain. Much of what they reported seemed frivolous to parents who had never attended a fashionable school and had struggled for the considerable learning they possessed. In better times they might have entered enthusiastically into this new world of their sons, but my father in particular jumped to the conclusion that his sons were not working hard at school. In fact they were, but they now lived in a culture in which it was a serious
faux pas
to indicate that one worked hard at study. The two worlds were not easy to mesh. As a result, the boys tended to work together; or we three made our
recreations as unobtrusively as possible away from the adult world. Bob’s passion was electronics. We spent hours together winding coils and puzzling our way through the diagrams which guided the construction of his first shortwave radio. He instructed me patiently in the characteristics of radio waves, and explained elementary concepts in physics by duplicating many of the demonstrations in his school textbooks. Barry took me with him on his early morning trips to collect the rabbits and foxes he trapped to help control these populations, which were hazards to our sheep. The skins provided him pocket money for investment in a wide variety of projects. While he was home from school, guides on writing short stories, books on muscle building, magazines about automobiles lent the mail bag an excitement lacking at other times.

There was not much room in the household routine for the mood swings and questioning of adolescence. Discipline was strict, and departures from it earned immediate punishment. The cloud of parental disapproval could be heavy when there was no escaping to other society. At sixteen, Bob let slip his religious doubts during a lunchtime conversation. Though these were a logical consequence of his heavily scientific school program, my parents were outraged. They had expected that by sending him to a high Anglican school, his religious education was ensured. Religious belief was a touchy subject in the family because my father adhered to his Catholicism while my mother was outspoken in her criticism of Catholic ideas on sexuality and the subordination of women. There was little occasion for the expression of these differences because there was no place of worship in either faith within seventy to a hundred miles of Coorain. Still, the differences slumbered under the surface. Poor Bob was treated as an unnatural being for his doubts and accused of being ungrateful for the sacrifices made to send him to a religious school. I was glad when the boys returned safely to school a week later without more explosions of discord. I was puzzled about the whole question
of religion myself, since my parents both seemed highly moral people to me. As both faiths seemed to produce excellent results, I did not know what to make of the difference. When we made one of our rare visits to Sydney, and my parents separated for the day, my mother to shop, my father to visit banks and wool merchants, I usually went with him, since I got tired and vexed my mother by complaining while she rushed to do a year’s shopping in a matter of days. At the end of the day, before setting out for our hotel or flat, my father would stop at St. Mary’s Cathedral for vespers. I liked the ritual and the Latin chant. I also understood when he said it would be better not to mention these visits to my mother.

The routine of the academic year required that the boys return to school at the end of the summer vacation before the periods of most intense activity on the property: crutching time in February (when only the withers of the sheep were shorn to limit fly infestation in hot weather) and shearing in early June. Crutching time in 1943 was particularly worrisome. It was a fearfully hot summer. The sheep were poorly nourished and the last season’s lambs weak. They needed to be moved slowly, held in paddocks close to the sheepyards, crutched quickly, and returned to their sparse pastures before heat exhaustion took its toll. In addition, to speed the whole process, someone needed to be at the woolshed, counting each shearer’s tally of sheep, and pushing the supply of animals into the shed, so that not a moment was lost. It was always an exhausting business, because speed required constant running about in the 100 degree weather. This year, it was clear that my father found it hard to bear the pace.

At home in the evening, I found my mother feeling his pulse, administering brandy, and urging him to lie down. The heat and anxiety had combined to revive the irregular heartbeat that had been one of the factors occasioning his discharge from the army in 1917. My mother was at her best caring for the sick. She radiated calm. The errant pulse was checked regularly and diagnosed as palpitations, but not a serious arrhythmia.

The next day, we went a little more slowly at the work in the yards, advised by my mother that we could still afford to keep the team an extra day or two, or lose a few sheep, provided that my father was in sound health. I now found myself volunteering for jobs I was not quite sure I could do, in order to be sure that he had more time to rest. The next afternoon, after the close of work at the shed, there was a lot of riding still to be done. “These sheep need to go to Rigby’s, that mob to Denny’s,” my father began, about to give me an assignment to return sheep to their paddocks. “I can do both,” I said rashly, having never moved so many sheep on my own. “Mind you, move them slowly, and don’t let them mix with the rams. Take the dogs, and don’t open the gate until you have the dogs holding them at the fence.” He had forgotten that I couldn’t remount easily, and that the dogs didn’t work very well for me. I was half pleased at completing the two assignments, half astonished that anyone had left me to handle them alone. Too much is being asked of me, I thought privately, forgetting that it was I who had volunteered. There was no getting around that the work was there and had to be done, and so I fell early into a role it took me many years to escape, the person in the family who would rise to the occasion, no matter the size of the task.

Shortly afterwards, the first terrible dust storm arrived boiling out of the central Australian desert. One sweltering late afternoon in March, I walked out to collect wood for the stove. Glancing toward the west, I saw a terrifying sight. A vast boiling cloud was mounting in the sky, black and sulfurous yellow at the heart, varying shades of ocher red at the edges. Where I stood, the air was utterly still, but the writhing cloud was approaching silently and with great speed. Suddenly I noticed that there were no birds to be seen or heard. All had taken shelter. I called my mother. We watched helplessly. Always one for action, she turned swiftly, went indoors, and began to close windows. Outside, I collected the buckets, rakes, shovels, and other implements that could blow away or smash a window if hurled against one by the
boiling wind. Within the hour, my father arrived home. He and my mother sat on the back step, not in their usual restful contemplation, but silenced instead by dread.

A dust storm usually lasts days, blotting out the sun, launching banshee winds day and night. It is dangerous to stray far from shelter, because the sand and grit lodge in one’s eyes, and a visibility often reduced to a few feet can make one completely disoriented. Animals which become exhausted and lie down are often sanded over and smothered. There is nothing anyone can do but stay inside, waiting for the calm after the storm. Inside, it is stifling. Every window must be closed against the dust, which seeps relentlessly through the slightest crack. Meals are gritty and sleep elusive. Rising in the morning, one sees a perfect outline of one’s body, an afterimage of white where the dust has not collected on the sheets.

As the winds seared our land, they took away the dry herbage, piled it against the fences, and then slowly began to silt over the debris. It was three days before we could venture out, days of almost unendurable tension. The crashing of the boughs of trees against our roof and the sharp roar as a nearly empty rainwater tank blew off its stand and rolled away triggered my father’s recurring nightmares of France, so that when he could fall into a fitful slumber it would be to awake screaming.

It was usually I who woke him from his nightmares. My mother was hard to awaken. She had, in her stoic way, endured over the years two bad cases of ear infection, treated only with our available remedies, hot packs and aspirin. One ear was totally deaf as a result of a ruptured eardrum, and her hearing in the other ear was much reduced. Now her deafness led to a striking reversal of roles, as I, the child in the family, would waken and attempt to soothe a frantic adult.