by Hazel Baron
Then, in 1950, along came Harry. Hazel always wondered what Harry saw in her mother, what with their age difference and the fact that Dulcie already had a family. Hazel could see, however, when she grew up and looked back, what had attracted her mother to Harry. He was young, good-looking and paid her compliments. Unlike her husband, he was vigorous. He wasn’t a quick thinker but he was a good worker. And he was malleable; Dulcie could get him to believe almost anything. One of the popular pastimes at the camp was playing euchre, a trick-taking card game usually between four people in teams of two. Harry and Dulcie quickly paired up.
Whether Harry’s mother and stepfather knew about the relationship, they said nothing. For Harry, the offer of not only sex but illicit, exciting, dangerous sex, was something not many hot-blooded 22-year-olds could turn down.
The Bible may have said that there was no rest for the wicked but Dulcie had always slept like a log. When Ted got home from one of his regular hospital visits, she suddenly developed ‘insomnia’. She told him she couldn’t get any rest, his snoring in the small caravan was keeping her awake and she desperately needed some peace and quiet. She told Ted she was off to try to sleep in their car, the big black Nash. She said she would take Hazel with her and the rest of the kids could have more space. To Hazel, she made it sound exciting and told her they were going camping, just the two of them. The truth was that it would have been too suspicious if she had gone off by herself. She told Hazel she would flog her if she ever told anyone what happened.
It was dark by 7 pm, Ted had taken his sleeping tablet and Dulcie had all the kids tucked up in bed. Once she started up the car and drove out of the camping ground, she turned left and pulled over to the verge, stopping just a couple of minutes along the road. Hazel wanted to know what was happening, why were they stopping by the side of the road? Dulcie told her to keep quiet. Then Hazel recognised the figure stepping out of the bushes and Harry climbed into the front seat. It was a spot just far enough away that no one in the camp ground could see them, not that Ted, with his arthritis, could have followed them. He could hardly move even when he hadn’t taken his sleeping drug. Another fifteen minutes further on, Dulcie found a place where she could pull off the road into the bush and the car was hidden by trees. She made up a bed on the front seat with a pillow and blanket and Hazel had heaps of room to stretch out because her mother got into the back seat with Harry. It was the first of many nights that the rocking of the car sent her to sleep.
The next morning, they always stopped to let Harry out at the same spot where they had picked him up. ‘Don’t tell Dad that Harry was with us,’ Dulcie admonished Hazel, the keeper of her secrets. ‘Mind what you say or you will know about it.’
At the camping ground, Harry hovered around like a moth getting dangerously close to the flame. Not long after her forty-first birthday in July 1950, Dulcie started packing up and told the kids they were leaving. In the middle of it all, Ted Baron came home from hospital again, this time leaning on a walking stick for the first time. There was no confrontation, Ted wasn’t like that, but the kids all stopped and stood by and watched as he asked Dulcie what she thought she was doing. Dulcie told him she was leaving.
Years later Hazel could cry when she recalled what happened next. Ted asked Dulcie if she was taking the children with her and she turned to the kids and, as young as they were, gave them an ultimatum — her or their dad. They knew their mum better than they knew their dad and first Hazel and then the others said they would go with her. Ted hung around awkwardly for a few days before he had to go back into hospital. While he was there, Dulcie finished packing, put the kids in the back of the car and with Harry — her future — in the front seat. They stopped when they got to Mildura because it seemed convenient and Dulcie wrote to Ted in hospital to tell them where the family was living. Ted hitched a lift to join them but ended up in Mildura Hospital.
*
After Ted Baron drowned and the inquest was over, Dulcie and Harry could stop pretending but their life was certainly no honeymoon. Dulcie sold the big army tents and they packed the rest of their meagre belongings in the trailer and took off. Just over a year after Ted’s death, Dulcie and Harry married in Wangaratta in December 1951 and then moved back to Korumburra where their son was born a few months later, Dulcie’s ninth child. Like Ted Baron, Harry had no idea of his wife’s other family and first husband. The secrets were mounting up.
In Korumburra, the family rented rooms and for the few months they were in town, the kids rode to school on an old draught horse called Taffy. As the oldest, Hazel rode up the front, then came Allan, Margaret and Jim down the back. At school they jumped off in the order they had climbed on and let Taffy free in the paddock next to the school until home time.
Harry hadn’t really thought through what it was going to be like living with five children and it was with great reluctance that he took on the role of stepfather as they lived a life on the run. Before they could put down roots in Korumburra, the family was up and moving, travelling from town to town across Victoria and South Australia, never staying anywhere for too long in case people got to know them. They were suspicious of everyone and kept changing their surname. One week they were Boyd, another they were Jones. Sometimes they used Harry’s mother’s new surname of Pill. Unemployment benefits had been available in Australia since 1945 but the Bodsworths never applied for the dole. They would have to both get an address and give it to the authorities and they would have had to be available and willing to work. Instead they relied on charities for food and clothing and money from odd-jobbing.
They were rarely in one place long enough for the children to go to school again and anyway, Dulcie didn’t trust them talking to people when she wasn’t there to keep them on track. Hazel and the others were belted by her if they spoke out of turn to anyone outside the family. Not in front of other people of course, as Dulcie never let reality get in the way of their image. She always had the kids as neatly dressed and as clean as possible. For much of the time, the kids had no idea who they were and what they were called. Often they forgot their new names. Was it Boyd or Jones this week? Whatever Harry had expected, it wasn’t a reality like this and he got sick of dragging the children everywhere. Hazel heard her mother tell him more than once to placate him: ‘They are our insurance. No one takes much notice of families. Just keep quiet.’ Malleable as ever, that is just what he did.
If it was warm and dry, they slept under the stars, rolling out tarpaulins and their thin shearer’s mattresses and getting under their waggas. When it was wet or cold, the car became their bedroom even though it was packed with all seven of them in it. Dulcie and Harry slept in the front seat where she was nursing the baby; the four siblings slept sitting up in the back where there was much jostling for position and arguing. ‘Get off me.’ ‘Move over!’
They washed in public toilets and showered when they could at truck stops. If they spent a night or two in one spot, Dulcie got out a piece of rope which was strung between two trees as a washing line and she and Hazel hand-washed the clothes at a local toilet block.
In March 1952, they had to drive back to Korumburra where Dulcie stood before a court for the first time in her life. Under her married name of Hazel Dulcie Bodsworth, she was fined three pounds for the crime of imposition, or obtaining money by deception. She pleaded ‘distress’ and got off paying.
The best times were when Harry managed to secure work as a farm labourer. When they got lucky, they were allowed to make their home in the shearers’ quarters. Sometimes they even got to live for a few weeks here and there in a house on a farm.
In 1953 they found themselves on a property just outside Naracoorte in South Australia, southeast of Adelaide on the way out to Mount Gambier. These kinds of jobs weren’t advertised and they had pulled in down the dirt road of many farms seeking work only to be disappointed. This time, the couple running the farm said they had enough work to keep Harry busy for a month or two in return for a few shillings an
d accommodation. They took it. The month or two turned into over three months and the family made the shearers’ quarters their home. There was plenty of work for Harry repairing fencing and the shearing pens as well as working on the land.
The quarters were rough and ready — a long low timber building with six separate bedrooms opening onto an open verandah. They could taste the dust inside the rooms as the wind blew through the gaps and under the doors and Hazel had her work cut out brushing the red dirt off the verandah every morning.
In the big kitchen at one end of the rooms there was a cast iron stove and a couple of tables. It may not have been much but to a family used to living out of their car, it was a palace. Dulcie and Harry took the biggest room and the kids threw their waggas on the beds in the other rooms, some of them with single beds, others with doubles which the twins shared so as not to sleep by themselves. They had never slept alone in their lives. Hazel took the room next to Dulcie and Harry. The kids could stretch out and sleep on the bunks and eat proper meals cooked by Dulcie. They were heartily sick of hot chip sandwiches. There were proper toilets and showers, which only had doors halfway up because they were usually used by men who had nothing to hide on the top. Hazel couldn’t care less. Life was wonderful . . . for a time.
For the kids there had been no room for wonder or curiosity in their lives as the minutiae of everyday survival dominated their time. Hazel was too busy subsisting, staying safe and trying to keep on her mother’s good side. Hazel had taught the twins, then eight, how to read and write but they didn’t have books of their own. Up at the big house, the couple’s children were in their late teens and had a treasure trove of books, which the couple let Hazel borrow. One of her favourites was Peter Pan. It was a copy of the book in hardback with a pale blue cover, and out of its pages flew a dreamworld where children could take off to a life of adventure. She helped the twins read it, and for a few weeks their imaginations ran wild as they stood on their beds, closed their eyes and thought wonderful thoughts and waited for the fairy dust to sprinkle down on them with the gift of flight. But every time they stepped off the bed, their feet hit the ground.
One morning Hazel was woken before daylight. Harry threw open the door to her room and whispered loudly: ‘Quick, your mum is sick. Come on.’ He had a parcel wrapped in newspaper under his arm. Hazel raced to her mum’s room. It was just coming on dawn and inside the room was dark. The only light was the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling and Hazel saw Dulcie lying on one of the single beds, her head on the pillow. Her face was pale, as white as a ghost, but the terrifying thing was that there was blood everywhere. The sheet covering Dulcie was red from her waist down. Hazel pulled the sheet back and screamed. She would never forget the sight she saw. There was a tiny baby between Dulcie’s legs. It was a boy, she could see that, but it looked more like a skinned rabbit. And it wasn’t breathing, just lying there.
Hazel ran out to tell Harry, who was digging a hole next to the clothes line and laying the newspaper parcel in it. Hazel could see that there was another tiny baby boy wrapped in the paper shroud.
Hazel was only thirteen but that morning she seemed to be the only grown-up. She told Harry to go up to the house and get them to ring for an ambulance. Harry grabbed her by the top of her left arm, gripping her until it hurt.
‘Don’t tell anyone about the babies, do you hear me? Loud and clear?’ he said.
Hazel was shaking. ‘No, I won’t, I won’t say anything, but there is another baby in the bed.’
Harry ran back inside the bedroom and came out with another newspaper parcel. He widened the hole and put the second baby into the sad little makeshift grave next to where the laundry was hung.
While Harry went to the house to use the telephone, Hazel stayed with her mum, holding her hand, as she thought Dulcie was going to die. Her mum had never looked so vulnerable. It was one of the few times that Dulcie couldn’t berate her for something; she was so sick that she couldn’t even speak. But even as she was comforting her mother, Hazel was angry at her for whatever had happened. She knew how babies were made by then — her own periods had started — and she knew this was not the right way to go about it. When the ambulance arrived, Allan was left to look after the kids and Harry and Hazel followed it to the hospital where Dulcie gave birth to two more stillborn babies and needed several blood transfusions.
A bank manager had recently moved to town and had put his name down as a blood donor. As it was a Sunday, he was playing tennis but he was dragged off the tennis courts to get to the hospital and make good his pledge to give blood. For Dulcie, it had been touch and go. The doctor told Harry that without the bank manager’s blood, she would not have made it. There had been no time to wait for blood to come from Adelaide.
Once they knew Dulcie was going to pull through, the doctor told Harry he was so sorry. He said that Mrs Bodsworth would be fine but she had been about twenty-four weeks’ pregnant, very late to have a miscarriage and especially tragic when there were quadruplets. The two he had seen were boys. The doctor said it looked as though she had already lost two babies before getting to hospital.
Hazel looked up, scared that they were going to get into trouble; the doctor seemed very stern. She saw Harry staring straight at her.
‘I don’t remember seeing any babies, doctor, only clots. Isn’t that right, Aggie?’ he said, using Hazel’s pet name. All she could do was nod. Despite Harry’s denials, it was recorded in state records that a mother had lost all her four quadruplets.
This time Dulcie had not shared her secret with Hazel — that she was pregnant again. She certainly hadn’t looked like a pregnant woman and Hazel had not known any of the other signs to look for. Dulcie hadn’t been to see a doctor although, as a serial mother, she would have known she was pregnant. It wasn’t unusual in those days for women not to seek medical help until a month before they were due. But Dulcie had not even told Harry that they were going to have more children. Obviously she didn’t know she was carrying quadruplets, but she didn’t want even one more mouth to feed. Instead of doing something about it, Dulcie had ignored it. Even at forty-four she was still careless with her children. If they had survived they would have been her babies 10, 11, 12 and 13, all boys. Now two lay under the clothes line on the farm and two were in the incinerator at the hospital.
Hazel didn’t know until years later, but Dulcie put a death notice in one of the major Victorian papers announcing her own end so that Ted Baron’s relatives wouldn’t come looking for her. Despite that, Hazel’s grandmother, Agnes Baron, never stopped looking for the children until she died in 1960.
CHAPTER THREE
SAM OVERTON
THE ORANGE DUST WAS KICKING UP ACROSS THE DRY SHEEPLANDS of Netallie Station the afternoon Dulcie decided to pick an argument with the cook. Tom never stood a chance after the Bodsworths arrived and Dulcie had decided she wanted his job along with the access it gave to his boss, station manager Milton Samuel Overton, known as Sam.
Tom was an English bloke and, as such, good at cooking hearty farm fare like meat and three veg. There was always plenty of mutton to turn into a meal on a sheep station. He wasn’t into fancy cuisine like cooking with wine but he certainly liked to drink the stuff. Tom lived alone in a room in one of the sheds on the hill behind the main house where the wine and a tot or four of whisky helped him cope with loneliness. As the housekeeper, Dulcie was the only other regular worker in the main house and she could smell the alcohol on Tom’s breath every day but she just bided her time until events gave her the chance she was looking for.
Tom had been at Netallie for some weeks before Overton took over as station manager in October 1955, two months before Dulcie and her family blew in on a foul wind. As his drinking got worse, so did his timekeeping and Overton, although not a stickler for punctuality, liked his tea on the table at five every day. In the cities, they would have called it dinner but in the bush, it was always tea, a cooked tea of course, not a ‘city’ afternoon tea of cakes
and scones. Tom’s increasing tardiness did not go unnoticed by Dulcie but she made it a point never to help him if the meals were late. He could dig his own grave, she thought.
Whether it was true or not, Dulcie took it upon herself this scorching afternoon in December 1955 to tell the hapless cook that the boss had had enough. She said Overton had asked her to tell Tom that he was sacked.
The language in the kitchen was as hot as the wind blowing outside. Young Jim was listening by the door as his mother ordered Tom out of the kitchen and off the station while in his flat English accent, Tom told her she was a bitch. And a bullying bitch at that. Dulcie was standing by the stove where she had a saucepan of water boiling on the hob. She picked up the pan while shouting at Tom that she would scald him for life if he didn’t do what she said and get out of her road, right now. Tom knew he had lost the argument and, with a final expletive, he turned and ran away in his singlet and working pants with Dulcie following him to the kitchen door. She lifted her right hand and threw the boiling water at him, leaving a red scald mark down the right side of his back; it took days to go away.
Her last words to him hung in the air as he fled her attack: ‘It does not do to cross me.’
Another local farming family had already discovered the truth of that statement.
Before the Bodsworths landed at Netallie, they had worked at Burragan Station, a nearby property; that is, ‘nearby’ by country standards. While Netallie is sixteen kilometres west of the town of Wilcannia, the turn-off to Burragan is ninety kilometres east of the town back along the Barrier Highway and then another twenty-seven kilometres down a dirt road.
