The river of my children’s childhood

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Tuross River

The huge tree is bare, but budding. Forty years ago when we first arrived in the Eurobodalla it was a small sapling, enclosed by a wire cage to protect it from dairy cows.

 

 

Just below the tree, about a kilometre from the bush block where my children grew up, the Tuross River makes its way to the sea. At the moment it flows gently, the sound of the mini-rapids just audible from the bridge. Sometimes it roars along, rising over the bridge, covering the riverside reserve, and once dramatically inching its way up the hill where we used to have a market garden. In severe drought it wavers to a bare trickle. Always it winds its way through the autobiography of my family.

 

 

On baking summer afternoons long ago we headed down to the deep pool near the jumping log. Little heads bobbed around in the shade of the casuarinas: arms flapped energetically, supported by yellow floaties.The big girl from the farm across the road appeared and soon the eldest daughter was swimming confidently under her no-nonsense tutelage. As the years passed, the older kids scrambled down the bank through brambles to the log and jumped off with a mighty splash. One afternoon we shared the snorkels and goggles and practised underwater observation on the very long eel, who retreated amongst the tree roots to escape the crowd.

During severe drought, the river all but disappeared. The farmer over the road dug a deep narrow channel and suddenly there was water. The children loved lying back and being carried along. Brown Surprise, on the other hand, thought they were drowning and ran up and down above them barking madly. At the end of the day, we’d take down barrels to collect water: our thousand gallon tank was nearly empty and there were six of us drawing on the limited supply. When a nit infestation invaded the house, we took all the bedding to the river, and washed it there. Our kids delighted in telling their townie classmates that they were drinking our bath water and washing water.

 

Slowly the kids grew up. Soon they were old enough to ride their bikes down to the river to meet their mates, and get up to all sorts of mischief. At night, they camped on the stretch of sand and occasionally went eeling. They discovered that a bread and butter knife was no use for eel-murder and threw the eel back to the roots below the water.

One day they rescued a baby crane from the sandy bank. They christened him Spike, after his hostile headgear rather than his excessive beak. He adopted their father as his, and decided the laundry was his nest. He attacked feet if they were bare when he was hungry, clacking at them sideways. If he squawked and clacked enough, Dad would stuff mince meat down his throat till his neck looked like a blocked vacuum cleaner hose. Then he was bunged outside before he began shaking his head to check that it was properly dead and dispersed it in a rough circle around him. When his neck was empty, he’d run around in circles, wings extended, squawking. His diet was obviously lacking, because he got rickets, staggering around on his knee joints till we dosed him on pentavite and sunshine. One morning he woke everyone up by systematically flinging and pinging drill bits he’d found in an ice cream container against the washing machine and soon after he swallowed a bolt from the tool box. My daughter stuck her fist down his throat and removed it, and then fed him milk to soothe the lacerations. He finally disappeared on New Year’s Eve, although there have been family tales of encounters with a crane who “seemed to know me.”

In the days of the market garden, I spent a lot of time by the river. I pulled up carrots and beetroot from the rich dirt of the river flats and took a load to wash, dragging it in a basket down the grassy track. At the end of a hot busy day picking, planting or weeding, we’d all fling ourselves in for a cooling wallow.

Immersed in post-separation misery, I set out to paint the house. After a morning session with the paint brush, I’d take myself down to the waterhole and plunge in. It was strange being there alone, in the middle of the day. I splashed around, contemplating the sudden change in my life, wondering how to ease my way into accepting its new shape with grace, and pleased by the undemanding physicality of cool water on bare skin.

When I arrived in Broken Hill to take up my teaching career, I went to professional training and suddenly found myself being asked to meditate, using a special place of calm to anchor me. I chose this bit of river, and suddenly found myself tearful and homesick.

The children have all gone away from the river now, except for Christmas visits. When they congregate, we lounge by the river, the grandchildren frolic with the dogs, and sometimes the kayaks are lifted off the roof and fishing lines are unreeled.

Sometimes the ageing parents (us) take chairs, glasses and a bottle of wine and sit in the reserve above the river as the stars come out, and the last light ripples in water darkening above the sand. Occasionally on a very hot night, we sit in the deep pool near the bridge and reminisce.

The river is the measure of the passing years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The street I grew up in

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childhood, the street where I lived

As I was reminiscing with an old friend a few nights ago – and lubricating the mind with a pleasant Chardonnay – I realised how potent the street I lived in as a child has been in my personal mythology and my dream life, as well as in my verifiable memory.

Across the road was a family I now recognise as brutalised and dysfunctional. The kitchen always smelt of stale milk, the smell embedded I think in a thick plastic tablecloth. The father was a real estate agent who scared my mother by offering his protection when Dad was off doing country service in the fire brigade. He let my future mother-in-law's house to a very attractive woman, tagged by the neighbourhood as a prostitute. He disciplined his younger son by holding his head under a cold-water yard tap on frosty winter mornings. His older son, for a few years the reason for my eager watering of the front garden in the hope that he'd pass by and say hello, ended up the sad victim of a nervous breakdown.

Further down the hill was a sombre brick house where Jeannette lived. She was a girl with red curls that I envied, and a cheerful disposition, but she wore a clanking metal calliper because she had caught polio, the disease that terrorised families in the late 1940s.

Next door to her was an old house, hidden by a thick hedge and covered with vines. There lived the Miss Julianas, who taught piano. You rarely saw them, but you did see earnest young musicians entering through the squeaky gate, and you could hear music pouring (or stuttering) from the front room. I longed to learn piano, but it was beyond the means and the expectations of my parents.

The McMurdos had no father, and a fat mother. There were a lot of them, and occasionally the police would visit. Meals were a shambles, and we never played in the house. We sat in the grassy gutter for our games. Opposite them lived Ruth, whose family had arrived from South Africa and had a way of speaking English that was fascinating to me in my narrow Anglo world. Games we played there were more daring: games like spin the bottle.

The stretch of North Road down to Fiveways has been a frequent site in my dreams, usually involving darkness and pursuit. But it also carries the ghosts of myself when younger. An eager 7 year old on a celadon green pushbike with a semi circular cane basket, I pedal down to collect a dozen eggs from my grandfather's hen sheds and wrap them snugly in newspaper to carry them back up the hill to the ordinariness of home. As a teenager, I walk head down with a suitcase in one hand and a book in the other, heading off to catch the train to school and, later, university: that's how I learnt the whole of “The rime of the ancient mariner” by heart, and struggled through the four volumes of “Clarissa”. As a young mother, I run frantically down the hill to get the doctor when my tiny daughter convulses. And finally there's the ghost of my mother, walking down the hill to buy the Saturday Herald just before she succumbs to the limitations of Parkinson's. She sorts through the pile of pages, discarding cars, homes, sport, travel and classifieds into a rubbish bin before she walks home. She is within a block of her three homes: her childhood home, her marriage home, and the home of her old age.

 

 

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Parks

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Berry Park, Granny Smith Park, Lane Cove NP, Spacerowa park, Umberumberka Dam

I often hear a program on Radio National that piques my interest, but I'm tardy and I never get around to participating by tweet or email or voice. Luckily, I'm a blogger, so I can cogitate at my leisure, and in this case use the theme of parks to trawl through memories going back to my childhood. Here are five parks that mark different stages in my life.

The park near Spacerowa, Warsaw

On my second visit to my Warsaw grandtwins, they are 7 months old and it's summer. Most afternoons I wheel them along past the Dolna flower stalls and into the park near the Spacerowa bus stop. There, paths wind through dense shade, lifted up by massive tree roots. In the lake a fountain shoots into the air. I head for our willow tree, spread the rug and haul the infants onto the ground. During my two month stay, they use their park time to crawl, sit and finally stand. They eye off dogs and birds and passers by and sometimes chase after them. They eat twigs and grass and puffed rice and squished bananas. They watch the wind in the grass and roll around on top of each other like puppies. Once I put Janek on the swing while Maja sleeps: I haven't yet learnt how to juggle them both. I'm in babcia heaven: I have them all to myself for a few hours, watching in adoration. Then it's time to buckle them into the stroller and head home, singing nonsense songs to them as they become grumpy and doze off. For a brief time each day I justify my existence as a grandmother in Warsaw, in the park near Spacerowa.

Umberumberka Dam, Broken Hill

Once upon a time when I was fifty, I lived in Broken Hill. When I felt the need to be near water, I packed a picnic and exam papers that had to be marked and headed out beyond Silverton to Umbumberka Dam. Suddenly I'm past little hills and looking out over a vast expanse of desert, with the road snaking between red dirt and low scrub. Just before the bitumen ends, the turn off to the dam winds up a hill, and I'm back in the land of water, sparkling blue and wet under a thick blue sky. I grab the thermos and my bag, pour a coffee, settle on a stone seat at a stone table and begin work, feeding my eyes on water between papers. In pouring rain, the creek runs vigorously and water plunges down the nearby gorge. I never see this, because the road from Broken Hill becomes impassable.

Umberumberka Dam

Apex Park, Berry

In Berry just north of Nowra, there's a fenced park with a rotunda. It was there we pulled out of bumpertobumper traffic one Easter weekend when my forty-year-old daughter was still bottle-fed. It was there we unloaded the ebullience of four children in a vain attempt to eradicate yippees for the rest of the journey to visit Sydney grandparents. It was there we stopped on the journey back from a Sydney hysterectomy and I sat with a lapful of pain and letters, resting and relishing the concern of friends. It was there I tasted my first artichoke heart in a picnic prepared by my bottle-fed baby when she came south for a rare visit many years later. Visiting from Warsaw last Christmas, my grandtwins picnicked there, sitting back to back, and eating from hands curled around their supply of puffed corn.

 

Granny Smith Park, Ryde

I'm twenty-eight and a new parent. I put my daughter in the red and white striped stroller and set off down the Bridge Rd hill to a piece of empty grass called Granny Smith Park. It's not like nowadays parks: no swings or slippery-dips, no little cubby-houses, no merrygorounds, no flying fox, just a sweep of tussocky grass down to a depression which becomes a swamp, even a creek, in heavy rain. This mothering thing is new to me. I'm used to spending my days in classrooms, not angsting over how to treat a three month old. But here we are, out in the sun, halfway between where I live now and where I grew up, in a park name after a relative who grew a new kind of apple.

Granny Smith Park now

 

Lane Cove National Park

One of the highlights of my year as a child was the Sunday School picnic at the Lane Cove river. I can still feel a tiny bit of the excited anticipation that filled the weeks leading up to the Day, and the anxious watching of weather in the few days before. I can see again the grassy slopes we rolled down, the food canopy pitched amongst the rocks, the long flat where we raced in sacks, carrying eggs on spoons, and in the tumble and confusion of the three-legged race. The swings and whirly platform were tame by today's standards, battered and worn, no primary colours, but no worrying about public safety either. Children devoured watermelon and lurid cordials and white bread sandwiches with devon or egg fillings. Romances began and flourished and ended. Mrs Sulc knitted whole jumpers – in Czechoslovakian, my mother said, intrigued by the speed of her fingers. In the afternoon there was the excitement of rowing up the river in hired rowboats.

When I was older, I rode my pushbike down for a day's boating with my brother and his mate, my eventual husband. Our courtship picnics took place there too: it was close enough to my work place at Macquarie University for a snatched lunch and lounge. Then – and this was forty years ago, when the river was clean – we'd take our daughter down to swim, and we picnicked there with our Sydney children and their grandparents. Much later, when I was revisiting childhood places in 2000, I hiked through the sandstone bush along the river from De Burgh's bridge. Once a rackety wooden construction high above the gorge which made my stomach drop, it was now a six lane swoop, the river flowing invisibly far below.

 

Lane Cove NP

 

Photos, except the twins, were all purloined from the Internet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My life in stitches

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knitting, sewing

A casual remark by a friend sent my memory cascading through all the sewing of my life, and knitting too, as the memory riff expanded.

My sewing career began with samplers in primary school: pinwheel and needle case showcased my skill at running stitch, whipped running stitch, french knots and lazy daisies. Then there was a pair of white bombay bloomers turning a delicate shade of grime as I learnt about run and fell seams and inserting elastic. When I was introduced to the joys of huckaback, I embarked on my first episode of obsessional behaviour (which later manifested itself in photographing bark and rock faces.) Evidence of my huckaback frenzy surfaced when I cleaned out houses after the deaths of my mother and aunts who had treasured arcane huckaback gifts. Long after primary school I huckabacked a knitting bag for myself in red, yellow and black, before I knew the Aboriginal significance of these colours.

 

 

I was very young when I learnt how to knit. My teacher was a missionary friend of my parents, on furlough from some exotic place: a Pacific island? New Guinea? Africa? She sat on our special chair with arms and a tapestry seat, and I stood in front of her as she guided my small hands through the intricate moves of plain and purl, initiating me into the possibilities of stocking stitch, rib, basket stitch and moss stitch. In a bout of enterprise when I was ten, I knitted striped tea cosies and sold them to my teachers. All through high school and university, I knitted as I studied, the same scraps of wool over and over again into strips, portrait or landscape as the whim took me. A bad move, I suspect, in the light of current research into the perils of multi-tasking.

 

Over the last few years I've been adding hand-knitted jumpers to the wardrobes of different members of my family. The pattern of the current one looked deceptively simple, but I stalled at the idea of repeating a collection of stitches 0 times. Usually I can do a pattern without thinking: this one crawls along at the rate of four rows a sitting as I count each stitch, and tick off each row. I shudder to think how many times at the beginning I had to rip rows undone, figure out where I was up to and start again.

 

 

All through my childhood, my mother made my annual new dress for the Sunday School anniversary in November. When I was 15, I bought the blue and green (should never be seen) material myself. I misread the pattern and got half a yard too little. Mum rotated paper pieces and improvised and completed the pintucked, waisted frock, but her patience and skill were sorely tried. She said “That's the last time I sew for you” and thrust me into the world of dressmaking. I made my short white crimplene graduation dress, and a red one, also short, when I was witness at my aunt's registry office wedding. After my own wedding, I manufactured a duffle coat for my new husband, a collection of maxi-dresses out of very cheap material for myself, a particularly hideous pinafore to cover my first pregnant bulge, and then clothes for my first little girl, including one with red ribbons tied at the side. Much later I tackled formal gear for my two daughters in high school: black, short and tight for my eldest daughter who was hobbled as she minced up the hillside and lowered herself into her Corolla; black, strapless and whaleboned for my younger daughter, driven to the venue by me in a shameful battered Corona. (For her year 12 formal, she bought her dress and waited for a limo to collect her.) The apotheosis of my dressmaking career was my sister's simple wedding dress. It ended up with a very classy rolled hem, because somehow I managed to make it too short. My niece had it altered for her wedding shortly after my sister's death.

When my children were small I was a toymaker. I made the whole Ingalls-Wilder family, Pa, Ma, Laura and Mary: hand puppet kings and princesses and the knave of hearts: pencil puppet penguins, parrots and owls. I made them for my own tribe and sold them through a Moruya craft shop.

My blood pressure misbehaved when I was expecting my fourth child. I didn't need medication. Patchwork hexagons did the job. I littered the world with small paper templates and snipped off ends of cotton. I still have the larger hexagonals, bright representatives of my capacity for the unfinished.

 

 

Lately, my sewing has mainly been patches on ripped clothes, multiple attempts to save a threadbare favourite skirt, and topping and tailing sheets. Until now. The imminent summer visit of my Polish twin grandchildren has me sewing again. Once again I face the challenge of threading the machine, turning corners, avoiding loopy stitches and a hard-to-manage reverse. Janek's shorts and top in two shades of blue aren't cut out yet as I debate size, but I am already enjoying the reversible sunfrock and flower petal hat draped on display over the back of the lounge chair, bright red and white spots for mała Maja.

 

 

Postscript: At this point my sewing machine, never entirely satisfactory, rebelled: loose stitches, bent needles, a recalcitrance when I tried to reverse became overwhelming. I sent it off to be serviced, and bought myself a new Bernina sewing computer. Now I'll have to take on a multitude of sewing projects till the end of my life to justify the expense, or accept the fact that two summer outfits for one year olds cost me $865.

 

 

For another take on the family knitting history, read my daughter's blog

http://migrationtothenorth.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/in-praise-of-knitting/

 

 

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Meeting past selves

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Broken Hill, market gardening, photography, Proust, teaching

Who'd have thought a trip to Moruya would gift me so many encounters with past selves from so many years? All because of the people I bumped into.

 

 

The teacher in Broken Hill

Once upon a time, I lived in Broken Hill for five years. During that time, I confirmed my own interests, lived alone for the first time, bought a house for $30 000, went through menopause, started a women's group and a writing group, fell in love with the desert and my house, and returned to school teaching. I learnt calligraphy, made paper, and shared a house with an artist. I camped on the banks of the Darling in Kinchega National Park and watched hawks fishing. I walked into the desert in the afternoons after work and spoke at a Reclaim the Night celebration (in the dark and without the benefit of my specs which I'd managed to tread on as I marched.) I wrote frequently and read a piece about a sweat lodge on ABC local radio. I festooned the car with balloons to meet my daughter's train when she returned from four years overseas and missed her because I forgot the half hour time difference. I shared the house with my other daughter who often asked “Who's the adult here?” and I mourned my two boys, left with their father back on the coast.

The market gardener

Once upon a time, I worked in our five-acre market garden. I planted and weeded and picked, and ended each day grubby and whacked. I washed carrots in the river, husked mountains of corn cobs, cooked up gallons of tomato sauce. I became a connoisseur of zucchinis and could estimate a kilo to the microgram. Each Friday we picked manically, and on Saturday morning I'd head off to the Moruya market, the roof of the 1967 Corolla piled high with cauliflowers, the inside packed (in season) with spinach, parsley, broad beans, capsicums, potatoes, green beans. I'd set up a stall – a door on wooden boxes – and reconnoitre veggie shop prices. We never had any money, so the change box began empty. Invariably the first buyer wanted a 20c cucumber and only had a $50 note. Occasionally there were hagglers who wanted a 20c cucumber for 15c. At the end of the day, I'd return home with the weekly shop and precious cash. We also had a roadside stall beside the garden with an honesty jar. Once it contained a bullet. Once I was bailed up on the beach by a guilty customer brandishing the money he didn't pay a year ago. Once we watched in disbelief as our neighbour ran his ute backwards and forwards over the boxes that constituted the stall. Our other enemies were grubs, friends who wanted to stop and talk, hot winds, Riley's cows, hailstorms, and of course floods and drought.

The Nerrigundah socialiser

Once upon a time, I socialised at the Nerrigundah Ag Bureau. I was one of those who smeared the walls with a rendering including cow shit. There were dances, dinners and cabarets. The kids could run wild in the dark and collapse in the tent when they'd had enough. It was there I listened to a rhapsody about being present as you swept the floor, and shared a log with one of the few totally unpleasant drunks of my life. It was there I toke in the many aspects of the alternative ideology and played pool on Ladies' Night. It was there my sons and their mates held Friday night jam sessions. There were also cricket days on a nearby reserve. Once I agreed to be the recorder of scores, a thankless job that required more concentration than I was capable of and left me far more fatigued than the cricketers.

 

 

The literacy consultant

Once upon a time I worked in schools all over the south coast as a literacy consultant. I'd often be away from home three nights a week. I spent a lot of time in classrooms, trying out advice I was giving teachers. Sometimes it worked; other times it was an embarrassing failure. I made PowerPoints with Year 2, wrote the longest paragraph in the world with year 4, expanded sentences with Year 1, provoked Year 6 into splendid complex sentences, and battled with the role of the full stop across all grades. In staff meetings I surprised some teachers and put others to sleep. I found interesting places to overnight. Room 6 at the Great Southern pub in Eden where they apologised for a price rise ($20 per night to $22 per night). Bumblebrook near Candelo, where a luxurious king size bed filled the room (they'd ordered a queen size and the drive was too rugged to argue when a king arrived). The old nurses quarters at Delegate, where I paid for a room and ended up with the whole house. A cabin on Jervis Bay where the bunks became my filing cabinet.

 

 

The photographer

Once upon a time, I owned a brownie box camera and produced black and white shots of dubious quality, which I put in an album with charcoal grey paper, using photo corners. Photography lurked in the background until I moved to Broken Hill in the early 1990s. The art teacher was a photographer and his stark black and white shots of old machinery in the regen area and a wilting sunflower against a corrugated iron fence reactivated my interest. I began borrowing the school camera at the weekend, and finally invested in a camera of my own – a golden non-digital that travelled with me to the Snowy, through the backblocks of Broken Hill and to Egypt, Syria and Jordan, recording bark, desert, snow gums (that reel of film disappeared forever), rainforest, beach, ruins, mosques and an archaeological dig at Pella. Just before I retired I bought a digital and began photographing every day. I figured I would've spent $1000 on development in the first month if I'd still been using reels of film. That camera masticated orchids, shells, more bark, and rock faces with its three megapixels, but it was a bit bulky for travel. Before my first trip to Warsaw, I put it aside and bought my current one, which has recorded rock pools, shells, beach pebbles, Poland and grandchildren.

 

 

An afternoon in Moruya yielded me at least as many memories as Proust activated with his more famous madeleine.

 

 

From Marcel Proust “Swann's way”

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.

 

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