9

OVER THE MOGRANI RANGE

We drove into Gloucester in our newly purchased big green Rover saloon with its wooden dashboard. For the first few months, we rented a rambling old weatherboard house with a back yard the size of a national park. There’s a photograph taken at the time of Stuart and me in our lounge room, sitting apart and looking in opposite directions. The image speaks volumes of our relationship.

I didn’t complain. I thought maybe this was what married life was about. At least I was better off than women in Third World countries.

The joy I found in being a mum compensated for the tension in our marriage. Life was very busy with two young children, but I loved caring for them and managing the home. After the morning washing, cleaning, cooking and shopping, the three of us would head off to the local swimming pool with other mums and children.

At one point, I developed eczema on my hands. The skin specialist wrote ‘automatic washing machine’ on the prescription pad, so we bought one. If only all our problems could be solved so simply.

It wasn’t long before we bought our first home in Ravenshaw Street, Gloucester. The local timber-mill owner and his wife and family were ready to leave, so we moved in soon after the sale. The front entrance was a large sunny room with a sandstone floor. It made an ideal fernery, so I filled it with hanging pot-plants. The back looked out towards the Mograni mountain range. Stuart cleared an area under the house for an out-of-hours surgery. I hoped that at last – maybe – we had the ingredients for a good life. We had two beautiful, healthy children, a lovely home, and money coming in from the medical practice.

Our first major purchases were a brand-new racing-green Volvo sedan to keep us safe on our journeys back and forth to Newcastle and a new Land Rover for fishing trips up to the Gummi Plains in the forested mountains of the Barrington Tops. We made new friends and went to the Lions, Apex, and Rotary balls in the winter-time. Life should have been good. Stuart was working hard, but for the first time in his life he was earning real money. We could buy whatever we fancied and eat out or spend weekends away.

Having been brought up by parents who had lived through the Depression, I avoided waste and extravagance, but it was wonderful not to have to scrimp and save. Sometimes Stuart insisted I buy things I really didn’t want, but I went along with the gesture to avoid upsetting him. He made me buy a frilly long cream lace dress on a trip to Sydney after I admired it through the shop window. It wasn’t something I would wear, and I regretted having looked twice at it.

No doubt he enjoyed spending money after years of struggling as a medical student in Sydney. Visiting The Rocks in Sydney, we found a beautiful solid wooden hand-adzed medieval dining room table and six brass wine goblets for our new home. We could now sit at our dining table and look out over a flowering white cedar tree to the rolling hills of the Mograni Range.

I was acutely mindful of Stuart’s sudden, unpredictable mood swings. One evening, after one of his outbursts, I ended up crying in Sarah’s bedroom. She was only about three years old, and she put her little arms around me while I cried. Although I can’t recall the cause of his anger, I do remember vowing never to subject her to my pain again.

Little things would trigger the storm. When we ordered our car, for example, we took delivery of a manual instead of an automatic. Stuart had gained his driver’s licence after we married and had never mastered the manual gears. I dared not laugh at the kangaroo-hopping as he tried to co-ordinate the clutch and accelerator. He was furious with frustration. One day he lost his temper simply because I adjusted the dial of the car radio to get a clearer reception. It was a minor mishap but another lesson learnt.

About this time, Stuart developed a fascination with guns. At his instigation, we both joined the Gloucester clay pigeon gun club. We made friends with other club members, who taught us how to stand, take aim and fire. The kickback of the shotgun on my first firing almost knocked me off my feet, but I persevered and became quite good. We ate a picnic lunch afterwards and shared the camaraderie. If it made Stuart happy, I would try anything.

We spent weekends away camping and trout fishing on a property in the rugged country of the Barrington Tops. It was freezing in the middle of winter in a tent, but Stuart seemed happy, especially if he caught an early-morning trout and cooked it for breakfast in the sizzling fat of the sausages.

An Old English sheepdog we named Oscar also became part of our family. Poor Oscar wasn’t all that popular with Sarah, who was forever being bowled over by his clumsiness. One day he escaped from our yard and was hit by a car. The young driver was devastated, but we nursed Oscar back to health with the help of a good vet.

Neither of us knew much about pets. We fed Oscar fresh meat from the butcher every day. This wasn’t only expensive but eventually caused a problem with his bones, because we’d failed to balance his diet with dry food.

Our best friends in Gloucester were Bill and Ella Sansom, who owned a dairy property just out of town. Ella, who worked at the surgery with Stuart and Allen White, immediately took us under her wing, easing us gently into the ways of country life. We found a generosity of spirit and good will in Gloucester, as in many other small towns, that unfortunately is absent in bigger cities, and Bill and Ella overflowed with it.

Bill was a lovable, happy-go-lucky dairy farmer with a big heart and a mischievous sense of humour. He was diagnosed with leukaemia a couple of years later, and his subsequent death caused enormous heartache for all who knew him. He and Ella also lost a much-wanted baby son, Michael, who was born prematurely at twenty-seven weeks after many years of trying. Stuart was their GP, and I felt very close to them during this period of unimaginable grief.

Stuart and I both mastered the art of four-wheel driving to explore the beautiful country around Gloucester. I also took advantage of the district’s long stretches of quiet country road, and with Stuart’s approval obtained a motorbike licence. I occasionally rode my motorbike out to Bill and Ella’s dairy farm to help round up cows for milking. Sometimes we shot rabbits at night from the back of a truck. I couldn’t do it today. I can’t bring myself to remove a hook from a fish now, but life was different in the country, and I knew I had to fit in.

The townsfolk seemed to like me, perhaps because I had no pretensions about being a doctor’s wife. The previous doctors’ wives had been part of what some called the ‘morning-tea set’. Where they wore hats, I wore jeans and rode a motorbike and played the guitar. There was always plenty to do in our small town. We had few empty spaces on our social calendar.

I learnt to cook well with the best food we could buy, kill or catch. Friends and patients shared their produce, providing us with a regular supply of fresh eggs, vegetables and meat. The people of Gloucester went out of their way to make us welcome and include us in everything that happened in the town.

Stuart had a wonderful reputation, which he worked hard to earn. He helped build a busy practice that was shared equally between the two doctors. From time to time he complained about doing too much work, but people liked him. That was important in a country practice. In the days before mobile phones, country doctors stayed close to home when they were on call, and I found plenty to do with Sarah and Brendan on these weekends.

There were times I felt a cautious kind of happiness – the momentary, fleeting kind that can just as suddenly disintegrate. There was always, always, hope stored somewhere inside me. I was able to dream of a better life, if only I could figure out what caused my husband’s anger. It worried me, though, that Stuart had begun to spend more and more time with his guns – taking them apart, oiling the mechanisms and reloading pellets in the shotgun cartridges.