A large percentage of the girls were country bred, for Australians are not entirely conditioned to the boarding-school idea, and the majority of children who live in the cities attend day school. So many of the fathers were graziers—sheep and cattle breeders. I spent several of my school holidays with a particular friend whose father owned a sheep station, and who, like most country folk, came to Sydney only for the Easter Agricultural Show, the ram sales, and the two major social events of the Sydney calendar—the spring and autumn race meetings. He was a delightful man, tough, wry, and unpretentious, with a typically Australian humour and a typically Australian capacity for alcohol. One race day my mother met him, dressed in his city best, leaning against the entrance of the Members Stand of the Australian Jockey Club, the exclusive institution of which he was a member, hacking away at his upper dentures with a pen knife.
‘Bloody things don’t fit,’ he complained. ‘New this morning. Suppose I’ll get ’em whittled down to shape before the last race.’
When the bush folk aren’t racing in the cities they have their own local meetings—the Picnic Races, and a rollicking picnic they are, for the whole boisterous, drunken, hilarious week. The horses are either local nags, mounted by their owners, or they travel from country town to town, within a limited radius. The tracks are the best available field: the bookies are, on the whole, so crooked that it’s wise to watch the race with one eye and your bookie with the other in case he beats a hasty retreat. The Picnic refers officially to the luncheon hampers brought by the spectators. Graziers for miles around are full up with house guests for their local Race Week; cocktail parties are held nightly at stations within a hundred mile radius, and it all culminates in the Picnic Race Ball, in somebody’s wool shed. The local pub is always bursting with stretchers in the corridors and whisky and milk tends to be mixed with the standard Australian breakfast of steak and eggs.
The Australian homestead, for the most part, is a comfortable bungalow surrounded on all sides by a wide, covered, and wire-netted verandah, well stocked with liquor, occasionally air-conditioned, and usually lacking in any domestic staff beyond the wife of one of the men, who might condescend to come in mornings and do the ‘rough’. Now, the grazier gets around in a Jeep or his private plane: when I was a child we rode from place to place, and horses were for use. We didn’t think of getting dressed up to ‘go riding’.
Summer holidays I stayed with a friend whose family had a boat at Palm Beach or, some years, we rented a house ourselves. For the six or seven weeks over Christmas, most of our friends moved down the coast, twenty-five miles or so, to one of the glorious palm-fringed northern beaches—Palm Beach, Whale Beach, Newport, Collaroy. At our seaside cottage one Christmas, the house party was kept awake for two nights by the deafening snores of a guest who left on the third day, profuse in thanks and apologies that he had driven the other occupant of his bedroom onto the verandah. Polite and indulgent laughter followed him down the path. When the last farewell had been waved at his vanishing motor car, my mother asked my father: ‘Who was that, darling? A nice man, I thought.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said my father crossly. ‘Never seen him before in my life. Thought he was a friend of yours.’
At this particular house, my mother’s hospitality had far outstripped the physical facilities of what was intended as a small family holiday cottage. A tent was erected in the back garden for myself and my friends: my mother usually spent the night on a swing hammock on the front porch, surrounded by those guests, laid out on divans and stretchers, whom she had been unable to squeeze into bedrooms. The liquor bill for the first month was so astronomical and my father’s nights so disturbed that on this occasion he rebelled and one morning stormed up to town, snapping at my mother that, in future, she could have her ‘bloody shooting box’ to herself.
When I, in my teens, began to have an active and independent social life of my own I found that the life of our household struck some of my young escorts as unusual. One was reported to me as having said, ‘Nice girl, Robin Eakin, but it’s a funny thing—it doesn’t matter what time of night you take her home, there always seems to be a strange man having a bath in that house.’ Another bewildered young man, whom I had not thought to introduce to my father, made enquiries around town as to the identity of the big man in striped pyjamas who wandered about the house. This didn’t bother me: what really plagued my adolescence was the nightly tussle of trying to round the bend in the stairs and the short stretch of corridor to the front door without having my beau of the evening waylaid by my grandmother and great-aunt. Every night they hovered at their bedroom door at the foot of the stairs and so finely judged was their timing that invariably their two heads popped round the door and hailed me just as I reached the angle of stair and hall. Neither affection nor good manners would have halted me, even had it meant, as it frequently did, pushing one or both of them aside; but they were cunning enough to direct their attentions on to the young man who, blushing furiously, must give full account of his antecedents, occupation and, if feasible, intentions.
Even more shaming to me were their frequent sorties into Sydney’s night-life. Now the city abounds in restaurants and nightclubs, but then there were only two really smart ones, Romano’s and Prince’s, and it was in one of these two that I spent almost every evening. At least once a week, Nana and Juliet rose from their beds, dressed as for a ball, reserved a floor table and sat watching me dance round the floor with my embarrassed escort. The head waiters adored them, for they ate prodigiously, drank quantities of champagne, and the society photographers flocked to take their picture. This would appear next day, to my rage and chagrin, beaming over the champagne bucket from the society pages, captioned ‘Robin Eakin’s grandmother and great-aunt’.
We, in our teens, led a more sophisticated life than English or European adolescents: freer, and at the same time, simpler. We lived in or on the sea all summer, danced half the night, and raced our parents’ cars up and down the perilous coastal roads. These were the years just before the war and we were conscious of nothing but the sun, and the sea, and the wide, warm, free country spilling its splendours about us.