PROLOGUE

AFTER MY mother died in 2002 it took me a few years to get out all the papers she’d left and look through them. I was afraid it would be a mournful thing to do, but the first exercise book I opened spoke to me as if she was beside me, the warmth and humour of her voice alive still: I have often thought about writing a book—people do it all the time—it can’t be that hard. Up till now I’ve never had the time or the right pencil but now that I have one foot in the grave it’s time to get on with it. I opened another. There was her workmanlike handwriting saying: There must be a way of writing a story—I’m going to try this time to write it backwards.

My mother’s many hopeful starts all petered out after a few pages. What she left was a mass of fragments. They often began with the stories about her forebears that she’d heard from her mother. Others were about her childhood. Most were about her adult life, up to her mid-forties. They taper away after that, perhaps because by then she felt less need to look back and try to understand.

She often quoted Socrates’ famous maxim: The unexamined life is not worth living. That terse judgment stayed with her all her life, shaping her actions and consoling her when things seemed bleak. Her sense of the past and the great sweeps of change she’d seen made her want to record, and to do more than record—to work out how her own individual life was part of the wider world. That was the urge behind the rich patchwork of fragments I was reading.

My mother wasn’t the sort of person biographies are usually written about. She wasn’t famous, had no public life beyond one letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald, did nothing that would ever make the history books. Just the same, I think her story is worth telling.

Not many voices like hers are heard. People of her social class—she was the daughter of a rural working-class couple who became pub-keepers—hardly ever left any record of what they felt and thought and did. They often believed their lives weren’t important enough to write down, and in many cases they lacked the literacy and the leisure time to do so. As a result, our picture of the past is skewed towards the top lot. Their written documents are the basis for our histories, the nice things they owned fill our museums, their sonnets and novels shape our imaginations. In the bits and pieces of my mother’s written memories, I had a first-hand account of a world largely left out of those histories and museums and about which no sonnets, as far as I know, have been written.

Yet her story represents that of a generation of people whose lives were unimaginably different from the lives of every generation of their families before them. When my mother was born, Australia and New Zealand were the only countries in the world where women had the vote. Free universal education stopped at primary school. Very few women worked outside the home. Only a handful of working-class children went to high school. Even fewer went to university or had professional training. Of those, hardly any were women. Even when they did work for wages, women were paid half a man’s salary. There was no organised child care. The only reliable form of contraception was abstinence.

By the time my mother’s children were growing up, all that had changed. Two world wars, an economic depression, and a series of social revolutions had changed the lives of hundreds of millions all over the world. Many families would know stories like my mother’s about their parents and grandparents. Her story is unusual in some ways, but in other ways it’s the archetypal twentieth-century story of the coming of a new world of choices and self-determination.

When Nance talked about her life, she often started five generations before she was born. The point of her story was that it was part of a bigger one.

Solomon Wiseman, her great-great-grandfather, arrived in Australia in 1806. An illiterate lighterman on the Thames, he’d been caught stealing timber and, along with his wife and young son, was transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. He quickly got his freedom and ‘took up land’, as the euphemism goes, on the Hawkesbury River. There’s nothing in the record about exactly how he ‘took up’ that land from the Darug people, but the chances are that he was part of the wave of settler violence against the original Australians.

The stories that have come down about him are unflattering. He was brutal to his convict servants and crooked in business. He’s said to have killed his first wife by pushing her over the balcony. When one of his daughters became pregnant to the riding master he’s said to have thrown her and the baby out of the house to die. Although he became wealthy, he refused to have his children educated, on the grounds that if he sent them to school they’d be humiliated because of their convict taint.

His daughter Sarah Wiseman married an Irishman, John Martin Davis from Cork. Davis was a free settler, but not a wealthy one. He acquired land in the Hunter Valley and the Liverpool Plains, lost most of it in the depression of the 1840s, and retreated with his wife and children to a small holding at Currabubula Creek, in northern New South Wales, not far from Tamworth, where he started a pub. Paddy Davis’s Freemason’s Arms, later the Davis Hotel, became a landmark on the stock route to Queensland. The Davises prospered and, as the village of Currabubula grew, they came to own most of it.

Their daughter, another Sarah, married an illiterate Cockney, Thomas Maunder. As a seventeen-year-old he’d been brought out with his family to work on Goonoo Goonoo Station near Currabubula. Goonoo Goonoo was the biggest pastoral estate in the country, run by the Kings, who were descended from one of the early governors. In the family stories Mr King was a hard man to his underlings. Maunder was hardly off the boat, a boy from London who’d probably never seen a sheep, when King made him take three rams—notoriously hard to handle—from Goonoo Goonoo to Quirindi, by himself and without a sheepdog. When Maunder’s sister died, Mr King made him dig her grave. Worse than these were the humiliations. If Mr King had to speak to Maunder, he’d say: Stand back, my man, at least two yards. You harbour the flies so!

Thomas Maunder worked hard and made enough money to buy his own small farm near Currabubula. One of his brothers did even better, and made sure his children got the best education the area could offer, at the Tamworth convent. Maunder didn’t send his children to school. He kept them home to work as shepherds—children were cheaper than fences. The exception was his youngest, Dolly, born in 1881. As she was reaching school age, one of their neighbours was prosecuted under the new laws for failing to let his children go to school. Maunder didn’t wait to be next and sent Dolly along to Currabubula Public School. Apart from her grandfather Davis, who probably had at least some education, Dolly was the first of her family to know how to read and write.

Currabubula Public School only went up to Grade Six, the end of primary school. Like all the other pupils, Dolly sat in Grade Six doing the same work over and over until she was fourteen, the legal school-leaving age. High school was out of the question. There were only six government high schools in the state and the nearest was two hundred miles away.

When she left school, Dolly wanted to train to be a schoolteacher. Maunder said no. He had enough money to support his daughters until they married. A daughter going to work would shame him. Over his dead body she’d be a teacher!

Dolly fell in love with a local boy, Jim Daly, and would have married him, but he was Catholic and the Maunders were nominal C of E. For a Protestant to marry a Catholic was unthinkable. In any case, Dolly’s parents had their eye on someone else.

Albert Russell was born in Currabubula in 1882. He was the illegitimate son of Mary Russell, his father unknown. Like Dolly, he went to Currabubula Public School. When he left at fourteen, he went to work for Dolly’s father. He was a big strong man who became a champion shearer. Dolly’s mother fancied him as a son-in-law because, she said, no one could cure and slice the bacon the way she liked it except Bert.

Dolly put off marriage for years. Several times she went north to Dorrigo to stay for months on end with a friend from school. Eventually, in 1910, when she was twenty-nine—nearly on the shelf—she had to give in. She and Bert married and set up house on a farm near Gunnedah that Maunder owned, called Rothsay. They worked it as sharecroppers, mostly growing wheat. Bert continued to go away shearing for ready money. A year after they were married, Frank was born.

Frank was nine months old and Bert was away when Dolly found a locked trunk in the shed. She broke it open. Inside were papers about child-support payments that Bert had been making. She recognised the name of the recipient straight away—it was a girl who’d worked for her mother. While Dolly was off at Dorrigo, Bert had been busy with this girl. It was Dolly’s mother who’d arranged for the girl and the baby to go away. She’d organised the payments and made Bert keep it a secret. For Dolly that was the worst part, that her mother had tricked her.

When Bert came back there was a tremendous row and he went off again, this time for good. But what could Dolly do, alone on a farm with a baby? She sent word for him to come back. Nine months later, in August 1912, my mother Nance was born.