Read Online Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker - Free Book Online Page A

disturbing: behind the look-at-me-now self-consciousness, there is the sense of a tentative and unfinished personality: vulnerable and open to hurt yet, at the same time, obstinate and defiant.
    She learned to type and got a job as a clerk, went to dances in all the villages around — Goolmangar, Nimbin, Keerrong, The Channon — stayed up late and got into trouble for it, played tennis and took up photography, and constructed a primitive darkroom with blankets in the bathroom. She took amateurish pictures of her first boyfriend, of the people she worked for and of her father, and developed them within cutouts of hearts, spades and diamonds. Like another young person later in my story she began to buy her own books and the first two — Longfellow’s poems and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — are significant. Thomas Hardy’s heroine Sue Bridehead — idealistic, perverse and doomed — could well have been a pattern for my mother. Soon her family moved to Bangalow and she got a job in the post office at Billinudgel and met my father.
    His name is Joseph
    He is the fifth child and fourth son of my Granny, the old lady of the garden described in the first chapter, and her Irish husband. He was named Joseph for his grandfather in Ireland and Oliver for the famous shipwright in Coraki, Oliver Jones, his great-uncle. His name is entered fifth in the big family Bible that rests on the cedar sideboard in the dining room, between the Staffordshire dogs. He grows up on a farm that is being hacked out of the rainforest by his father, helped by Hindu labourers. He becomes the favourite of one of these, who calls him Tolya, a nickname that sticks in his family. He and his brothers play cruel jokes on the Hindus, tricking them into carrying parcels of meat (unclean!). They defecate in the ashes which the Hindus will rake over with bare hands early in the morning to make their johnnycakes — Unclean! Unclean! He tramps the country roads with his brothers, a team of them; he whistles, perfects bird calls and collects the speckled eggs from the nests for the collection which all country boys had in those days. He makes strong and accurate shanghais from forked sticks and strips of rubber, and owns a sharp and many-tongued pocket knife for these and other tasks. He shoots every butcherbird he sees, for they are cruel and kill the smaller birds, the wrens and finches. He is an accurate shot; the sharp pebble flies straight, smashes the ribcage and crushes the heart. The butcherbird drops, blood dribbling from its mouth, to stiffen in the sun.
    He goes twice each Sunday, on sufferance, with his mother to the little Church of England at Keerrong, closes his eyes and pretends to pray. His father had been dead since he was eight years old and his mother has given the intricate carved cedar pulpit to the church in his memory. The teacher boards with his mother. She is Miss Freda Kneipp; she comes from Tenterfield and must be respected. His Aunty Florrie comes to stay. She is his mother’s younger sister and is deaf and dumb. She lives in a Home at a place called Morriset. She is a frail little woman in a cheap cotton frock who makes strange guttural sounds and talks with her hands. Her only possessions are a collection of small and cheap china animals which she carries everywhere with her and compulsively arranges on tables, windowsills, or any flat surface. His mother explains that Florence fell into a copper of boiling water when she was an infant, and this accounts for her disability. When his mother is not looking he and his brothers pull horrible faces at her and cruelly mimic her guttural gasps and sign language.
    He goes to school, learns his lessons well, but hates it. His name appears often in the punishment book for fighting, answering back or swearing in the playground — six of the best, the throbbing hands shaken and shaken, and then held trembling between the thighs as the lessons proceed.