On my third Sunday morning with the O’Callaghans, I noticed Lawrie preparing to cut the high grass in the field next to the house. At the back door, he began by sharpening two large scythes on a grindstone. These implements each had a six-foot-long curved, wooden handle, two smaller handholds, and a three-foot metal blade. Except in a Jean-François Millet painting of nineteenth-century French peasants—Millet prints had hung in my sixth-grade convent school classroom—I’d seen nothing like them before and was intrigued. I offered Lawrie my help, also hoping I might finally be able to strike up a friendly conversation.
Lawrie showed me how to cut in a long sweeping motion and, a rhythm established, slowly advance by reaping along an imagined row. The work was tiring and I soon needed gloves, but we kept going. The grass would be ready to be gathered into stooks after being left to dry for a day or two.
As I scythed, I occasionally looked up to take in the surrounding hills with their thick woods. I felt at one with Millet’s labourers, although not at one with those of Vincent van Gogh, as his paintings of reapers featured colours more varied and vibrant than those around me. I didn’t see the golds, reds, pinks and mauves of Van Gogh’s palette; the bush at Weabonga had darker tones of charcoal, silver, olive and navy-blue, among the dense, almost black greens. That I saw beauty in the shadowy woods against the bright blue sky struck me forcibly.
Lawrie could have kept scything all day, but he sat with me for a smoko and broke his customary silence. He pointed just down the hill and said, ‘Tennis this afternoon.’
‘Who plays?’ I asked. ‘Can I join in?’
‘Yair.’
Until then I’d been spending Sunday afternoons at the school getting ready for the week ahead. Unable to see the community tennis court from inside the schoolroom, I hadn’t noticed it was in use, so Lawrie’s terse advice was a bit of a revelation.
I felt I had established a slightly better relationship with Lawrie although little had been said. Mostly it had just been the two of us reaping in tandem, in silence.
There were about eight adults in the tennis party. All knew who I was, so they greeted me with a warm welcome as they introduced themselves. I’d met a few when they brought their kids on enrolment morning, but several introduced themselves for the first time. They all wanted to tell me how absolutely delighted they were that I had come to town and how important it was, for all at Weabonga, that the school had reopened.
‘Our small school is the glue that holds this place together,’ Vic Teegan said. He had a sheep property about ten miles out on the back road to Ingelba, the nearest community to Weabonga.
‘Indeed,’ added Tony Wallace, whose property was also around ten miles out of the village but on the Limbri Road, in the opposite direction to Vic’s place. ‘Anything that happens in this community usually comes about through the school. We were all terribly worried when there was no teacher for us at the beginning of the year. We’d heard threats that our kids might be made to bus down to Dungowan. Well, we couldn’t accept that—no good for the kids and no good for us. We’d lose the community if the school closed.’
The tennis was arranged as games of doubles, with each game being only one set, ensuring frequent changes of players. The pairs were drawn from a hat. Everyone played a couple of games, then all shared an afternoon tea with homemade cakes and biscuits. It was warm and pleasant, an excellent introduction to the wider community.
Although the players weren’t overly chatty, they managed to extract lots of information from me. Straightforwardly, not in the least bit embarrassed by the personal nature of the information they sought, they put queries to me, and expected answers.
‘Tell us something about yourself, Peter,’ said a village mum, June Baulderstone.
‘How long have you been teaching?’ asked Monica Whitworth, another village mother.
June and Monica were sisters-in-law, each with two boys at the school.
I was happy to be interrogated and offered everything they wanted to know. These parents had placed their children in my care—they had a right to know all about me.
In turn, I asked lots of questions about Weabonga. I confirmed there were just five homes in the village, and that the group of huts up the hill was inhabited: an elderly brother and sister had lived there all their lives. I decided to go up and introduce myself to the pair in the near future.
All the village homes had primary-aged children, and the parents seemed to be in their mid-thirties to late forties. Outside the village there were some older children of school age, but these kids were either at boarding school or were residents in the Tamworth hostels for secondary children during term time.
All the men of the village were day labourers, taking whatever work was offered on properties in the surrounding area. They didn’t travel too far from home, finding enough employment on nearby stations to provide for their families. All could shear but chose not to spend weeks away in shearing teams. The men could turn their hands to most tasks needed on a grazing property. The village families also kept a few head of stock—‘killers’, they called them—on the town common situated over the bridge and around the next couple of bends off the Limbri Road; these animals provided meat for the family meals.
The village women, all wives and mothers, were fully employed in their home duties.
‘We do what we can with what we’ve got,’ explained June, ‘but there’s lots to do and we’re always chasing our tails.’
From working with the kids I’d already come to understand that their families lived precarious lives, sustaining themselves through intermittent work and whatever food they could produce. These weren’t layabout or hillbilly people but hardworking folk, doing their best to provide for their kids and build a better future for them. Most were probably in Weabonga because housing was cheap, and home ownership offered some stability in challenging circumstances.
I had learnt some Weabonga history from Bon during the drive in his mail car, but I heard much more that first tennis afternoon. There had been mining of quartz reef gold in the area for quite a period, and I was advised to be careful walking through the bush as there were still many shafts and most had no protective fencing. Stock was sometimes lost into such shafts. Bill Whitworth advised, ‘Watch where you go, mate. Keep your eyes open as you walk. Always look around and know where your next step’ll go. You fall down one of those shafts and we’ll never clap eyes on you again.’
For a while the gold had attracted a large population—five hundred or more people had lived in the village at times. There had been a number of active hotels and several shops as well as a police station and a courthouse for petty sessions. The former police station was now the relatively substantial home across from the tennis court.
Max Baulderstone pointed to a large old chimney standing isolated on the hill above St George’s church and told me, ‘That was a hotel and billiard room. When the gold was flowing, the village was a busy little place.’
I was surprised to hear that one of the corrugated-iron huts, the home of the elderly siblings whom I’d yet to meet, had been a courthouse. The story was that the father of this pair had been the resident magistrate, and when he’d died unexpectedly his children had somehow become stranded and were living out their lives in relative poverty.
The four players from grazing properties described a little of their way of life. Weabonga was in a high-rainfall area, and the weather patterns were fairly consistent. Grass was normally lush and nutritious, so the locals pastured high stock numbers. Each property in the area was about fifteen hundred to two thousand acres in extent and carried around three to four thousand sheep, around two head per acre, with some cattle. The wool was quite fine, not top quality but always attractive to foreign buyers, so when wool prices were high the properties returned significant incomes. The homesteads were quite substantial, machinery was in good order, and an older Teegan child had been sent off to private boarding high school.
Max reported, ‘Some of our village kids have done real well at our little school and have been chosen to go on to Farrer for high school.’
Farrer was a selective state high school at Nemingha, about twenty miles away near Tamworth, where the children had been boarders. Max seemed proud of having some pupils qualify for a selective school, and the nods of Bill and Vic confirmed what I was suspecting: the Weabonga families wanted their children to do well and to progress in our village school. Their comments were designed to let me know they would be watching me. That didn’t put me off; I was pleased they shared my high expectations for the kids.
It was clear from everyone’s interactions around the tennis that they enjoyed friendly, respectful relationships, whether they were landowners or day labourers. I’d enjoyed getting to know them a little, our interactions wonderfully welcome after three weeks of almost no communication with adults.
A little later I found that meeting June Baulderstone and Monica Whitworth had been a gift, as they joined the Parents and Citizens Group that we set up to support the school. Vic Teegan and Marie Wallace also came to the P and C whenever they could.
I’d very much appreciated the tennis club’s afternoon tea. That evening Jill served up the usual—baked rabbit with squash. Lord save me!