The Road from Coorain

by Jill Ker Conway

  My mother could not have decided upon any experience better calculated to banish our daily routine and superimpose startling new experiences on the troublesome memories of the year. They began the day our ship, the MV Strathnaver, sailed. Before the days of regular air travel, the departures of ocean liners were major events in Australia. Encouraged by postwar prosperity, thousands of Australians flocked aboard the P. and O. fleet of liners to make their ritual journey “home” to England before settling down in their real homeland. Each vessel was farewelled by an alcoholic crowd, its members cheering and weeping by turns, shouting advice (much of it crude references to the ways of foreigners), remembering last messages, singing sentimental songs, and waiting at the docks until the last paper streamer thrown to friends aboard had broken. The Strathnaver was going “through to Tilbury,” having picked up almost a full complement of passengers in Sydney. It sailed for eight days around the coast of Australia, stopping at Melbourne, Adelaide, and Fremantle, before setting out for seventeen days across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon.

  Many passengers were made seasick by the swell going across the Great Australian Bight, and some were troubled by the pitching of a storm a day or so out from Perth, but we were entranced; exploring the ship, seeing our first flying fish, watching the other passengers. In the beginning, I was intimidated by the first-class dining room. The menus were enormous, remnants of an Edwardian style of dining. I was uncomfortable in my unaccustomed finery, and totally inexperienced in polite dinner table conversation. Gradually I learned the delights of choosing between caviar and smoked salmon for a first course, sampling grouse and other English game, eating my first Stilton cheese, and entering into serious discussions with our steward about what kind of soufflé would be best for dessert. I set to so heartily as a trencherwoman that no amount of pacing the deck could atone for my appetite, and the whalebone supporting the pink tulle began to be very confining indeed.

  The evenings lived up to every movie I had seen about ocean voyages. The wake glowed with phosphorescence, the sea breeze blew gently, the band played sedate dance music, and a wonderful array of older people disported themselves on the dance floor. It was fascinating to work out with my mother which couples belonged together, who was having an affair, what widow was setting her cap at what retired major. My mother was as diverted as we were by the change of environment, but she was puzzled by her children’s behavior. We were agog to find our place among the other young people on the ship, whereas she, still grieving, wanted to retire early and expected us to accompany her. My determination not to remain dutifully by her side was reinforced by our traveling companion, Eva’s daughter, a few years my senior. She was understandably determined to enjoy a shipboard romance, and more than ready to argue about my mother’s expectation that we would retire when she did. My mother could not require our presence to avert anxiety about road accidents so, reluctantly, she gave approval for us to retire when we chose. As soon as she went down to her cabin, we broke most of her carefully prescribed rules. I danced clumsily with strangers, Barry sampled more than the beer at the bar, and we began to get to know some of the other passengers.

  Besides the usual Australian tourists, the ship carried Indian and Pakistani army and air force officers, families from the former Indian and Ceylonese Civil Service, the children of tea and rubber planters en route home from school and university for the summer holidays, and numerous retired English couples who made the journey out to Australia and back to escape the English winter. Some of the passengers must have been aware that India and Pakistan had just endured two years of murderous racial strife following Independence, and that British rule in Ceylon had ended less than a year ago. But we lived on shipboard as though the great British navy and merchant marine still controlled the globe. I became enamored of the son of one British planter family from Ceylon, and freed from my mother’s supervision, I saw in the New Year at a particularly bibulous party in his cabin, where Barry came upon me, cheerfully tipsy at 1:00 a.m. This united us in a happy conspiracy of silence about our secret misdemeanors. My host and his friends seemed unaware that their world was about to collapse. Instead they gave me experienced advice about how to manage “the natives.”

  Elderly men and women told me romantic stories about the glamorous Northwest Frontier of the old British Raj; Barry and I listened enthralled to the war tales told by colorfully dressed Pakistani Air Force officers; all of us were regularly regaled with lengthy sea chronicles told by the petty officer who looked after passenger entertainment. His most memorable stories were of the wild behavior of the Australian troops the Strathnaver had carried to the Middle East in 1940, and brought home again in 1942 to defend their homeland from the threat of Japanese invasion. For me, he was the star of all the characters gathered on our voyage. More than six feet tall, he carried an enormous beer-inflated belly with stately dignity. His talk was always slipping toward profanity, and his language was peppered with vivid imagery. He ran the horse races and bingo games expertly, calling the numbers in rhyming cockney slang with a voice more gravelly than any I had ever heard. His dissipated eyes looked as though they had seen every form of human depravity and his demeanor of barely controlled scorn softened only when he talked about his adored ship. He liked instructing me, and never let fact stand in the way of a striking story. Ceylon, he told me, was an island so beautiful and so laden with spice trees and gardens that the perfume told one to expect landfall many miles out to sea. He had a gift for language. When he described Aden, the next port after Colombo, with its blue-grey mountains ringing the harbor and the sails of the Arab dhows reflecting the sunset, it seemed as though my life would be incomplete without seeing it with him to identify the forts and the British naval vessels lying at anchor in the roadstead. I began to understand the wonders of travel.

  Once we disembarked in Ceylon, this understanding changed quickly to ambivalence. The Australia of my childhood contained only a minuscule population of non-British descent, so that I had never really seen another culture. Reading could carry me in imagination beyond the confines of Coorain or Sydney, but it could never make me experience a non-British world, let alone test the usual British imperial attitudes of superiority toward other peoples. Schooled as I was in all Australia’s class sensitivities, I was unprepared for a society of caste. Colombo was a teeming Asian city where begging was a way of life. At the Grand Oriental Hotel, an ancient “punkah boy” slept on a mat outside my bedroom door in case I called for anything in the night. I was troubled by having to beat the beggars away on the street, and by the instruction to ignore the tugging hands of the children who grabbed my skirts crying for money. I felt so disoriented by the extremes of poverty and by my uncertainty about how to behave that I could not relax and enjoy the color, the vitality, and the richness of the new sights and sounds. People told me that the children with stumps for legs, or holes where their eyes had been, were that way because they had been deliberately deformed so as to be more effective beggars. That did not help me sort out how to behave to them or what I thought about this new society.

  The Grand Oriental Hotel, our base for a week in Colombo, lived up to its name. Its Edwardian splendor was fading in 1949, but its vast white marble lounge, sprinkled with cane tables and chairs, cooled with potted palms and soporific ceiling fans, seemed very grand to me. In the afternoons, there was a thé dansant, when the band played Strauss waltzes and Hungarian gypsy music. This was the hour when the white-clad young men who worked for the British banks or insurance companies came to sip cool drinks and dance away the afternoons with women whose toilette and elegant silk dresses had clearly commanded the attention of skilled servants. One of our shipboard friendships had been with a family traveling to the wedding of their eldest daughter to a young English bank officer, so we were soon introduced to this society. Its members brooded every afternoon over gin and tonic about the decline of the British Empire and the mess the Sinhalese would make of ruling themselves. Such expectations of nonwhite p
eople had been one of the unquestioned verities of my world, but after my first actual encounter with the way a multiracial imperial society worked, I began to be less sure about everything. I could feel the hostility of the street crowds and the ever-present watchfulness of the hotel servants. They made me uneasy.

  A new view of history began to shape my perceptions as soon as we left Colombo. The city itself, with its fragrant gardens, white-galleried buildings, and thriving commerce, registered only vaguely through my jumble of emotions about the poverty and the thinly veiled resentment of British-looking people. Our first visits to Buddhist temples and sacred sites gave me what then seemed the astonishing information that this great religious figure had existed nearly six hundred years before Christ. Each great temple contained relics of the Buddha, objects of veneration, just like Christian relics. Why had no one taught me more about this earlier faith so similar to Christianity in so many respects? Moreover, why had I been taught to date everything from the birth of Christ and the emergence of the Christian West, when great capitals like Anuradhapura, among whose white, gold, and grey ruins we climbed, had been thriving three hundred years before Christ’s birth? Seeing these remains was an unexpected culture shock which meant that Europe could never again seem “old.” After that, ancient remains always conjured up for me the greying rocks of Anuradhapura, the outline of its temples and palaces in perfect scale, clearly visible despite the encroaching jungle. Hitherto I had dated my understanding of political life with the development of the British parliament. As our guide talked about the thriving empire ruled from Anuradhapura and the political conflicts which had flourished there, the picture captured my imagination and made me realize that there were other political traditions about which I knew nothing. Military history also took on a new aspect after the scorching day when Barry and I climbed the hill fortress of Sigirya, dating from the sixteenth century. At the top, surveying the plains below, one could picture the ruling monarch whose armies had ridden elephants and had controlled the exuberant fertility of the irrigated plains below. One entered the pathway to the fortress through the fierce mouth of a lion carved in the mountainside, as large and commanding a monument as an Egyptian pyramid. Away from the massed population of the city, I could take in the beauty of the island and register such vivid new sights as the outline of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. Nearby, a patch of rain forest of breathtaking beauty, containing an undreamed-of profusion of exotic vegetation, had been preserved. The avenue of palm trees in the gardens of Kandy along which processions mounted on elephants had once paraded became a symbol for other kinds of grandeur than the photographs of England I had been taught to revere.

  Despite the fact that such powerful and enduring subversive perceptions were being etched on my mind, I was not a happy traveler. I had been raised in a household of such precise regularity, governed by such an obsession with cleanliness, that I shared my mother’s fears about whether our rooms were really clean, and I joined her in rejecting the unfamiliar-tasting food. Along with this low-level anxiety, I was puzzled about how to understand and organize the daily flood of new images. My first sight of a Hindu wedding procession outside a small village looked like such fun. The bright colors, the flowers, the music, and the energy expressed in the procession as it flowed sinuously along captured my imagination. My mother remarked that the bride was a child, and that village people often sent themselves into bankruptcy for such festivities. I knew this was true, but when I contrasted the scene with my mental picture of the kind of wedding I and my classmates would likely have, I wondered for the first time whether ours might be a little stuffy. It was disturbing to be prompted to such thoughts, and I was not certain I enjoyed it. So much of the culture we were viewing in our journey round the island was the product of religion. This was a Buddhist and Hindu country. I wondered idly what Australia was. Did people in Ceylon believe in karma and a cyclical view of history to explain away the terrible inequities between classes and castes? This set me wondering what beliefs we had at home to justify our inequities. Such ideas were unheard of. I began to look forward to going home and settling into a familiar routine.

  As our return voyage drew to its close, it was clear that my mother was also relishing the thought of home. She had set about the journey impulsively and had given us an expensive and luxurious vacation, hoping to ease the sadness of Christmas without Bob. She had managed that wonderfully for Barry and me, and for Eva’s daughter, but she had not reckoned with what her actions would mean. She had introduced us to the very world of fashionable luxury she had previously ruled out of bounds. Her action was prompted in part by guilt at the thrift which had prevented her from gratifying some of Bob’s much simpler wishes. While she recognized this, she felt, childishly, that we should be more visibly grateful for the largess than we were. Our journey together made clear that she was no longer the center of our world, and that we were poised to search for new adventures on our own. She kept her peace while we were traveling, but on our return her wounded feelings began to show.

  On the second weekend after our return, Barry and I, sitting idly with the Sunday morning paper, found ourselves in the midst of a hurricane of disapproval. Why were we lounging around? Couldn’t we see that the grass needed cutting, the shrubbery cried out for pruning, and the garden was choked with weeds? Had we been so spoiled by our ten weeks of sea cruising that we were incapable of taking care of the place? Her words and her bearing conveyed the impression of someone vexed by the recognition that she must face the future dragged down by a pair of useless drones. Without exchanging a glance, we leapt to attention and fell to with a vengeance. As I set about attacking the weeds, an inner voice I had not heard before remarked, “So, we are going to have to pay for it.” I quickly silenced it as unworthy. Yet it was there, waiting to be attended to. It was a long time before I heeded it seriously, but from this point on, at one level of my consciousness, I knew that my mother’s gifts came at a considerable price. They might seem to be freely given, but there would come a time afterwards when they had to be earned.

  The general cloud of disapproval vanished on my return to school, with the discovery that I had been chosen as captain of my class. My mother was genuinely delighted when one of her children excelled, and this recognition from the respected Miss Everett counted heavily with her. Barry, however, was not so fortunate. My mother told him sternly that his current life lacked focus, that he was drifting from one kind of work to another, and that this could not be tolerated. She asked him to go back to Coorain to work under the supervision of the manager, Geoff Coghlan, and to prepare himself for the day when he would assume responsibility for running the property.

  That my brother’s life lacked focus was certainly true. But the remedy betrayed little understanding on my mother’s part of herself, her son, or the manager she had chosen to run Coorain for her. Her notion that she would happily release the reins of management of the family enterprise to her son in the not-too-distant future was pure fantasy. She was incapable of such an action. She took her psychic energy from being in charge and could not delegate the smallest decisions to her long-suffering manager, let alone her young son. Barry, at twenty years of age, was dispatched to work as a subordinate on the property my mother herself had found an unbearably lonely place without the companionship of her husband. Just at the time he longed for friends, for laughter, and for lively society, Barry found himself alone, without young companions, without the stimulus of new ideas, without any element in the daily schedule but the hard labor of caring for sheep. Moreover, he was caring for them under the aegis of a crusty and unsympathetic taskmaster. Geoff Coghlan was a good and upright man by his lights, but he was not a saint. Only a man given to self-sacrifice would have trained his replacement and encouraged my brother to feel his powers of command, when Coorain represented to Geoff and his wife the home and the independent life circumstances which the accident of Geoff’s age and generation had withheld from them. Instead, Barry, whose self-conf
idence had withstood a school which did not encourage slow learners, now found himself working daily enduring the burden of regular criticism and encouragement constantly withheld. His time at Coorain was a test of endurance which he survived, but his letters home, while outwardly optimistic, revealed the price he was paying. It was from this time that I dated his taciturnity, his difficulty showing his feelings, and the clouding of a naturally cheerful nature by a stoic view of life.

  My mother, intent on establishing her son in the country, tried to persuade several of his friends to join him as workers on Coorain. She filled them with stories about the wonders of the independent life in the bush, the pleasures of seeing direct products from one’s work, anything but the truth about the hardships and the inevitably losing battle with the seasons. My brother would write back to her urging restraint and reminding her of the realities of life in the bush: the loneliness, the harsh weather, the grinding routine of heavy labor, “the general deadness of the place,” and the difficulty a landless young man would encounter in building a real competence through work for others. He was the twenty-year-old realist, and she the impractical romantic.