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

He has three older brothers. One is in the Light Horse in Egypt and sends home photos of himself posing with other soldiers in Cairo and Alexandria. He doesn’t mention the establishments in the Haret el Wasser in Cairo, or the riot known as the Battle of the Wazzir where the men of the AIF sack and burn the brothels and toss the burning mattresses into the street, not through moral outrage but because the prices have risen and the grog is poisonous. The AIF to a man swear that the New Zealanders did it. He does send black velvet cushion covers with the Nile at sunset on one, camels and palm trees in front of the pyramids on the other, both stencilled in silver and gold. These take pride of place in the sitting room. The two other older brothers have left school and are supposed to help his mother run the farm but they are out of control. They fight in the cowbails and flog him with a legrope when he is sent to help them after school. This family has too much spirit. The mother is nearly crazy trying to keep them and the farm together. It’s at this time, about ten years before I’m born, that she leases the farm and builds herself The Chalet, the house in the garden that plays such a joyous part in my childhood.
    This boy who will one day be my father finishes primary school and goes to Lismore on the cream lorry to sit for the QC (Qualifying Certificate), the entrance to high school. The town boys lie in ambush to flog the boys from the bush. Four of them give him a hiding before he reaches the high school gates, bruised, shaken and with an impressive nose bleed. He doesn’t pass and doesn’t care. He leaves school at twelve and at fourteen goes to work grubbing out lantana on a farm up Terania Creek for thirty bob a week and keep. Here he is working close to the Whian Whian State Forest, and brings home the staghorns, the elkhorns and bush orchids from the rainforest that his mother hangs on the tankstand on the cool and shady side of the house. He works long hours and is always hungry, for the farmer is too tight (or too poor?) to feed his own children let alone one more. He sleeps on a bag stretcher in the barn with the bedbugs and lice. When he goes home for the weekend his mother makes him strip in the paddock and boils his clothes in the copper while he bathes in the tin bath in the washhouse. Only then can he come into the house. When he goes back after the weekend he takes tins of biscuits and cake and hides them under his bunk but by the Monday afternoon the farm children have stolen and eaten them all. He tells all this to us later as a joke. My father’s stories are completely different from my mother’s. His usually have a wry point; though he is a victim he is able to laugh at himself, whereas hers are always high drama.
    He gets a job at Nimbin as a butcher’s boy and learns the trade that he follows all his life. His brothers become either butchers or share farmers; several progress to own their own farms, one becomes a policeman and another, the most adventurous, becomes a district officer in New Guinea and, later, a flight lieutenant in the RAAF. He begins to play football and becomes a star, in demand throughout the district. He plays Premier League and sports a new blazer every year with the coat of arms of a Rugby club on the pocket. The girls love him. Every Christmas his family goes to New Brighton to a beach house owned by his older sister and her husband. They go by train from Lismore to Booyong, to Bangalow to Byron Bay, then Billinudgel, hop down from the train at the little station and tramp through the bush with all their luggage. This is the family’s second home. They fish and swim and the boys go to dances at Brunswick Heads, Bangalow and Billinudgel. There he meets the girl behind the post office counter.
    My father falls quickly in love with my mother and she with him. She is soon pregnant, a fact I find hard to believe, knowing her strictness. It’s