2001
1
I am seven. I live in a valley in the rainforest. Around us is the remnant of the Big Scrub which once covered the land from north of Murwillumbah to the Richmond River. Beneath the tangle of giant softwoods, cedar, rosewood and teak, the envy of the cabinet makers of the world, is a warm maze of fern and lawyer vine. The smell of cut timber permeates the air as the massive trees are felled and the logs hauled to the mill. The houses which line the single street of the village are for the most part built of raw timber, with tin roofs and tin fireplaces. Verandahs and tankstands are festooned with staghorns, elkhorns, hares-foot ferns and orchids from the scrub.
The valley with its two creeks, Terania and Tuntable, is encircled by the cleared flanks of the mountains, green with paspalum, studded with the stumps of the rainforest trees. Behind are high bluffs, and beyond them the serrated peaks of the Nightcap Range, and then Mount Warning. The great mountain, an extinct volcano, is seen only from the heights yet its presence is always felt, kingfisher blue, looming in the distance.
Returning to this place sixty years later I am stunned by my familiarity with a skyline imprinted on my consciousness since birth; it cannot be supplanted by any other sweep of horizon, no matter how much loved or newly familiar. There is an almost physical shock of recognition as the primal horizon superimposes itself on the mind and settles into its own place. This is home, the place of birth, of the birth of consciousness.
Here days seem eternal. One of the few time-markers is the noon plane, a Stinson I learn later, which passes over the valley each day on its way from Brisbane to Sydney. To us it is as distant as the moon, but still a reminder of the great world outside the valley. This is the plane which later crashes on the Lamington Plateau in a cyclone, a famous episode in Australian aviation history The survivors are lost in the jungle for almost a week. One seeks help, crawling on lacerated knees through stinging nettles and lawyer vines. Bernard O’Reilly, the bushman who finds them, is a national hero, and the event becomes folklore, then myth.
Another time-marker is the lighting of kerosene lamps in the kitchens of distant hill-farms. We kneel, my sister and I, on a kitchen stool by the casement window, watching one light after another come on, and naming the familiar homesteads as the milking is finished and families come home to tea. We wind up the gramophone, a portable His Master’s Voice left with us by a sophisticated aunt who is a typist in faraway Canberra, and play the hits of the thirties. ‘When It’s Lamp-lighting Time in the Valley’ seems written just for us, but we love the Gladys Moncrieff, the Bing Crosby and Jessie Matthews records which our mother brings home from Lismore, twelve miles away.
This then is the primal scene: the dusk is as perfumed as Aphrodite with the stocks, wisteria and may bush in our mother’s garden; the rainforest edges closer with the strange cries of its nocturnal birds and animals; the full moon rises behind the great shoulder of the mountains; the gramophone plays and the lights of the valley come on one by one. All is well and seems as permanent as time itself.
2
BURDEKIN MEN
Burdekin men wear blue singlets bleached to grey, tight khaki shorts, felt hats and mostly no boots.
They carry cane-knives sharp enough to slice straight through a leg above the knee.
They are accompanied by dogs known as Meathead or Hereboy.
They call one another fond nicknames such as The Meatant or the Barra.
They distrust the South. Sometimes one ventures as far South as Brisbane. One or two of the most adventurous go to the Melbourne Cup and marvel at the cold (in November).
They know two seasons only, the crushen and the slack.
For most of the year they planted cane, water cane, cut cane, cart cane to the siding, talk about cane and dream about cane. When one of their wives is selected for the Queensland hockey team they say that don’t grow no cane.
One asks the cane inspector for advice on his wife’s pregnancy, for he sees a certain similarity between a woman and a cane-paddock. In each case it’s the yield that’s important. She speaks only Spanish so doesn’t understand the insult. The cane inspector circumnavigates her great belly as slowly and gravely as he would a patch of cane, scrutinises it front-on and side-on and predicts a boy. It’s a girl.
Burdekin men like womanly women, those who know their place.
Of sex they say wisely, ‘It’s got to be fed and it don’t eat wheat’.
BURDEKIN WOMEN
Burdekin women cook over hot fuel stoves; wash all the clothes in the copper outside in the burning sun; starch and iron the men’s shorts and shirts, worn when going to town to drink or bet; make all the family clothes.
They sit in a car outside a pub with grizzling children for hours.
They are grateful when their husband brings out an occasional shandy. They don’t drink straight beer. Women who drink straight beer have been known to get out of control.
A Burdekin woman does not interrupt the men in the pub or the club, scream, fall frothing to the floor or beg her husband to come home soon or she’ll kill herself. As a spoiler of men’s pleasures she would shame her man forever.
Burdekin women are sometimes taken to the new RSL club if it’s a social evening. Here they gather in a group discussing their children while the men carry on about what they did in the war, the snakes they have seen, the fish they have caught and the cane they are growing.
They are womanly women. They pride themselves on this; they know their place.
Of sex they say nothing, of childbirth plenty.
Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle,
University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2003